Transcendent 3, page 26
Rachel apparently decides that Jeffrey’s name alone isn’t working. The cadaver pauses and then blurts, I would really love to hang with you. Hey! I appreciate everything you’ve done to set things right. JEFFREY! You really shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for me.
Somehow, these statements have an edge, like Jeffrey can easily hear the intended meaning. He looks up and sees Rachel’s eyes, spraying tears like a damn lawn sprinkler.
Jeffrey, the corpse says, I saw Sherri. She told me the truth about you.
She’s probably just making things up. Sherri never knew anything for sure, or at least couldn’t prove anything. And yet, just the mention of her name is enough to make Jeffrey straighten up and walk to the door of the observation room, even with no signed Interlocution Permission form. Jeffrey makes himself stride up to the two nearly naked bodies and stop at the one on the left, the one with the ugly tattoo and the drooling silent mouth.
I don’t want to hurt you, Jeffrey says. I never wanted to hurt you, even when we were kids and you got weird on me. My mom still asks about you.
Hey pal, you’ve never been a better friend to me than you are right now, the cadaver says. But on the left, the eyes are red and wet and full of violence.
What did Sherri say? Stop playing games and tell me, Jeffrey says. When did you see her? What did she say?
But Rachel has stopped trying to make the other body talk and is just staring up, letting her eyes speak for her.
Listen, Jeffrey says to the tattooed body. This is already over, the process is too advanced. I could disconnect all of the machines, unplug the tap from your occipital lobe and everything, and the cadaver would continue drawing your remaining life energy. The link between you is already stable. This project, it’s a government-industry collaboration, we call it Love and Dignity for Everyone. You have no idea. But you, you’re going to be so handsome. You always used to wish you could look like this guy, remember? I’m actually kind of jealous of you.
Rachel just thrashes against her restraints harder than ever.
Here, I’ll show you, Jeffrey says at last. He reaches behind Rachel’s obsolete head and unplugs the tap, along with the other wires. See? he says. No difference. That body is already more you than you. It’s already done.
That’s when Rachel leans forward, in her old body, and head-butts Jeffrey, before grabbing for his key ring with the utility knife on it. She somehow gets the knife open with one hand while he’s clutching his nose, and slashes a bloody canyon across Jeffrey’s stomach. He falls, clutching at his own slippery flesh, and watches her saw through her straps and land on unsteady feet. She lifts Jeffrey’s lanyard, smearing blood on his shirt as it goes.
When Rachel was in college, she heard a story about a business professor named Lou, who dated two different women and strung them both along. Laurie was a lecturer in women’s studies, while Susie worked in the bookstore co-op despite having a PhD in comp lit. After the women found out Lou was dating both of them, things got ugly. Laurie stole Susie’s identity, signing her up for a stack of international phone cards and a subscription to the Dirndl of the Month Club, while Susie tried to crash Laurie’s truck and cold-cocked Laurie as she walked out of a seminar on intersectional feminism. In the end, the two women looked at each other, over the slightly dented truck and Laurie’s bloody lip and Susie’s stack of junk mail. Laurie just spat blood and said, Listen. I won’t press charges, if you don’t sue. Susie thought for a moment, then stuck out her hand and said, Deal. The two women never spoke to each other, or Lou, ever again.
Rachel has always thought this incident exposed the roots of the social contract: most of our relationships are upheld not by love, or obligation, or gratitude, but by mutually assured destruction. Most of the people in Rachel’s life who could have given her shit for being transgender were differently bodied, non-neurotypical, or some other thing that also required some acceptance from her. Mote, beam, and so on.
For some reason, Rachel can’t stop thinking about the social contract and mutually assured destruction as she hobbles down the hallway of Love and Dignity for Everyone with a corpse following close behind. Every time she pauses to turn around and see if the dead man is catching up, he gains a little ground. So she forces herself to keep running with weak legs, even as she keeps hearing his hoarse breath right behind her. True power, Rachel thinks, is being able to destroy others with no consequences to yourself.
She’s reached the end of a corridor, and she’s trying not to think about Jeffrey’s blood on the knife in her hand. He’ll be fine, he’s in a facility. She remembers Sherri in the computer lab, staring at the pictures on the Internet: her hair wet from the shower, one hand reaching for a towel. Sherri sobbing but then tamping it down as she looked at the screen. Sherri telling Rachel at lunch, I’m leaving this school. I can’t stay. There’s a heavy door with an RFID reader, and Jeffrey’s card causes it to click twice before finally bleeping. Rachel’s legs wobble and spasm, and the breath of the dead man behind her grows louder. Then she pushes through the door and runs up the square roundabout of stairs. Behind her, she hears Lucy the nurse shout at her to come back, because she’s still convalescing, this is a delicate time.
Rachel feels a little more of her strength fade every time the dead man’s hand lurches forward. Something irreplaceable leaves her. She pushes open the dense metal door marked EXIT and nearly faints with sudden day-blindness.
The woods around Love and Dignity for Everyone are dense with moss and underbrush, and Rachel’s bare feet keep sliding off tree roots. I can’t stop, Rachel pleads with herself, I can’t stop or my whole life was for nothing. Who even was I, if I let this happen to me. The nearly naked dead man crashes through branches that Rachel has ducked under. She throws the knife and hears a satisfying grunt, but he doesn’t even pause. Rachel knows that anybody who sees both her and the cadaver will choose to help the cadaver. There’s no way to explain her situation in the dead man’s voice. She vows to stay off roads and avoid talking to people. This is her life now.
Up ahead, she sees a fast-running stream, and she wonders how the corpse will take to water. The stream looks like the one she and Jeffrey used to play in, when they would catch crayfish hiding under rocks. The crayfish looked just like tiny lobsters, and they would twist around trying to pinch you as you gripped their midsections. Rachel sloshes in the water and doesn’t hear the man’s breath in her ear for a moment. Up ahead, the current leads to a steep waterfall that’s so white in the noon sunlight, it appears to stand still. She remembers staring into a bucket full of crayfish, debating whether to boil them alive or let them all go. And all at once, she has a vivid memory of herself and Jeffrey both holding the full bucket and turning it sideways, until all the crayfish sloshed back into the river. The crayfish fled for their lives, their eyes seeming to protrude with alarm, and Rachel held onto an empty bucket with Jeffrey, feeling an inexplicable sense of relief. We are such wusses, Jeffrey said, and they both laughed. She remembers the sight of the last crayfish rushing out of view—as if this time, maybe the trick would work, and nobody would think to look under this particular rock. She reaches the waterfall, seizes a breath, and jumps with both feet at once.
The Worldless
• Indrapramit Das •
Every day NuTay watched the starship from their shack, selling satshine and sweet chai to wayfarers on their way to the stars. NuTay and their kin Satlyt baked an endless supply of clay cups using dirt from the vast plain of the port. NuTay and Satlyt, like all the hawkers in the shanties that surrounded the dirt road, were dunyshar, worldless—cursed to a single brown horizon, if one gently undulated by time to grace their eyes with dun hills. Cursed, also, to witness that starship in the distance, vessel of the night sky, as it set sail on the rippling waves of time and existence itself—so the wayfarers told them—year after year.
The starship. The sky. The dun hills. The port plain. They knew this, and this only.
Sometimes the starship looked like a great temple reaching to the sky. All of NuTay’s customers endless pilgrims lining up to enter its hallowed halls and carry them through the cloth that Gods made.
NuTay and Satlyt had never been inside a starship.
If NuTay gave them free chai, the wayfarers would sometimes show viz of other worlds on their armbands, flicking them like so much dijichaff into the air, where they sprouted into glowing spheres, ghost marbles to mimic the air-rich dewdrops that clustered aeon-wise along the fiery filaments of the galaxy. The wayfarers would wave in practiced arkana, and the spheres would twirl and zoom and transform as they grew until their curvature became glimpses of those worlds and their settlements glittering under the myriad suns and moons. NuTay would watch, silent, unable to look away.
Once, Satlyt, brandishing a small metal junk shiv, had asked whether NuTay wanted them to corner a wayfarer in a lonesome corner of the port and rob them of their armband or their data coins. NuTay had slapped Satlyt then, so hard their cheek blushed pink.
NuTay knew Satlyt would never hurt anyone—that all they wanted was to give their maba a way to look at pictures of other worlds without having to barter with wayfarers.
When NuTay touched Satlyt’s cheek a moment after striking, the skin was hot with silent anger, and perhaps shame.
Sometimes the starship looked like monolithic shards of black glass glittering in the sun, carefully stacked to look beautiful but terrifying.
Sometimes the starship would change shape, those shards moving slowly to create a different configuration of shapes upon shapes with a tremendous moaning that sounded like a gale moving across the hills and pouring out across the plain. As it folded and re-folded, the starship would no longer look like shards of black glass.
Sometimes, when it moved to reconfigure its shape, the starship would look suddenly delicate despite its size, like black paper origami of a starship dropped onto the plain by the hand of a god.
NuTay had once seen an actual paper starship, left by a wayfarer on one of NuTay’s rough-hewn benches. The wayfarer had told them the word for it: origami. The paper had been mauve, not black.
The world that interested NuTay the most, of course, was Earth. The one all the djeens of all the peoples in the galaxy first came from, going from blood to blood to whisper the memory of the first human into all their bodies so they still looked more or less the same no matter which world they were born on.
“NuTay, Earth is so crowded you can’t imagine it,” one wayfarer had told them, spreading their hands across that brown horizon NuTay was so familiar with. “Just imagine,” the wayfarer said. “Peoples were having kin there before there were starships. Before any peoples went to any other star than Sol. This planet, your planet, is a station, nah?”
NuTay then reminded the wayfarer that this was not their planet, not really, because it was not a place of peoples but a port for peoples to rest in between their travels across the universe. Dunyshar had no planet, no cultures to imitate, no people.
“Ahch, you know that’s the same same,” the wayfarer said, but NuTay knew it wasn’t, and felt a slight pain in their chest, so familiar. But they knew the wayfarer wouldn’t know what this was, and they said nothing and listened as they spoke on. “If this planet is port, then Earth, that is the first city in the universe—Babal, kafeen-walla. Not so nice for you. Feels like not enough atmo for so many peoples if you go there, after this planet with all this air, so much air, so much place.”
And NuTay told that wayfarer that they’d heard that Earth had a thousand different worlds on it, because it had a tilt and atmos that painted its lands a thousand different shades of place as it spun around the first Sun.
“Less than a thousand, and not the only world with other worlds on it,” the wayfarer said, laughing behind their mask. “But look,” the wayfarer raised their arm to spring viz into the air, and there was a picture of a brown horizon, and dun hills. “See? Just like here.” NuTay looked at the dun hills, and marveled that this too could be Earth. “Kazak-istan,” said the wayfarer, and the placename was a cold drop of rain in NuTay’s mind, sending ripples across their skull. It made them feel better about their own dun hills, which caught their eye for all the long days. Just a little bit better.
So it went. Wayfarers would bring pieces of the galaxy, and NuTay would hold the ones of Earth in their memory. It had brown horizon, blue horizon, green horizon, red horizon, gray horizon.
When the starship was about to leave, the entire port plain would come alive with warning, klaxons sounding across the miles of empty dirt and clanging across the corrugated roofs of the shop shanties and tents. NuTay and Satlyt would stop work to watch even if they had customers, because even customers would turn their heads to see.
To watch a starship leave is to witness a hole threaded through reality, and no one can tire of such a vision. Its lights glittering, it would fold and fold its parts until there was a thunderous boom that rolled across the plain, sending glowing cumulus clouds rolling out from under the vessel and across the land.
A flash of light like the clap of an invisible hand, and the clouds would be gone in less than a second to leave a perfect black sphere where the starship had been. If you looked at the sphere, which was only half visible, emerging from the ground a perfect gigantic bubble of nothingness, it would hurt your eyes, because there was nothing to see within its curvature. For an intoxicating second there would be hurtling winds ripping dust through the shop shanties, creating a vortex of silken veils over the plain and around the sphere. The shanty roofs would rattle, the horses would clomp in their stables, the wind chimes would sing a shattering song. The very air would vibrate as if it were fragile, humming to the tune of that null-dimensional half-circle embedded in the horizon, a bloated negative sunrise.
In the next moment, the sphere would vanish in a thunderclap of displaced atmos, and there would be only flat land where the starship had once stood.
A few days later, the same sequence would occur in reverse, and the starship would be back, having gone to another world and returned with a new population. When it returned, the steam from its megastructures would create wisps of clouds that hung over the plain for days until they drifted with their shadows into the hills.
Being younger dunyshar, Satlyt worked at the stalls some days, but did harder chores around the port, like cleaning toilets and helping starship crews do basic maintenance work. Every sunrise, NuTay watched Satlyt leave the stall on their dirt bike, space-black hair free to twine across the wind. The droning dirt bike would draw a dusty line across the plain, its destination the necklace of far-off lights extending from where the squatting starship basked in sunrise—the dromes where wayfarers refueled, processed, lived in between worlds. The dirt bikes would send wild horses rumbling in herds across the port plain, a sight that calmed NuTay’s weakening bones.
NuTay had worked at the dromes, too, when they were younger and more limber. They’d liked the crowds there, the paradisiacal choirs of announcements that echoed under vaulted ceilings, the squealing of boots on floor leaving tracks to mop up, the harsh and polychrome cast of holofake neon advertising bars, clubs, eateries and shops run by robots, or upscale wayfarer staff that swapped in and out to replace each other with each starship journey, so they didn’t have to live on the planet permanently like the dunyshar. Nowadays the dromes were a distant memory. NuTay stayed at the shack, unable to do that much manual labour.
Those that spent their lives on the planet of arrivals and departures could only grow more thin and frail as time washed over the days and nights. The dunyshars’ djeens had whispered their flesh into Earth-form, but on a world with a weaker gravity than Earth.
NuTay’s chai itself was brewed from leaf grown in a printer tent with a second-hand script for accelerated microclimate—hardware left behind from starships over centuries, nabbed from the junk shops of the port by NuTay for shine and minutes of tactile, since dunyshar were never not lonely and companionship was equal barter, usually (usually) good for friendships.
NuTay would meditate inside the chai-printing tent, which was misty and wet in growing season. Their body caressed by damp green leaves, air fragrant with alien-sweet perfume of plant life not indigenous, with closed eyes NuTay would pretend to be on Earth, the source of chai and peoples and everything. Each time a cycle ended, and the microclimate roasted the leaves to heaps of brown brew-ready shavings, the tent hissed steam like one of NuTay’s kettles, and that whistle was a quiet mourning for the death of that tent-world of green. Until next cycle.
The tent had big letters across its fiber on the outside, reading Darjeeling in Englis and Nagar script. A placename, a wayfarer had clarified.
When Satlyt was younger, they’d asked NuTay if the dunyshar could just build a giant printer tent the size of the port itself, and grow a huge forest of plants and trees here like on Earth or other worlds. NuTay knew these weren’t thoughts for a dunyshar to have, and would go nowhere. But they said they didn’t know.
The starshine was easier, brewed from indigenous fungus grown in shit.
Sometimes, as evening fell and the second sun lashed its last threads of light across the dun hills gone blue, or when the starship secreted a mist that wreathed its alloyed spires, the starship looked like a great and distant city. Just like NuTay had seen in viz of other worlds—towers of lights flickering to give darkness a shape, the outline of lives lived.
The starship was a city, of course. To take people across the galaxy to other cities that didn’t move across time and existence.
There were no cities here, of course, on the planet of arrivals and departures. If you travelled over the horizon, as NuTay had, you would find only more port plains dotted with emptiness and lights and shop shanties and vast circular plains with other starships at their centres. Or great mountain ranges that were actually junkyards of detritus left by centuries of interstellar stops, and dismantled starships in their graveyards, all crawling with scavengers. Some dunyshar dared to live in those dead starships, but they were known to be unstable and dangerous, causing djeens to mutate so kin would be born looking different than humans. If this were true, NuTay had never seen such people, who probably kept to themselves, or died out.
