Clarkesworld: Year Five (Clarkesworld Anthology), page 35
The conglomerates that invested in the technology created the rehabilitation centers in China and lobbied to change the labor laws to institutionalize the idea of “rehabilitation” so as to hide the truth.
They discovered that those suffering from the side effects of time sense dilation and those suffering from the side effects of time sense compression can help each other, be each other’s cure.
“I’m the yang to your yin, is that it?” So her interest in me is limited to my value as a medical device. My middle-aged male ego is hurt.
“Sure, if you insist on thinking about it that way.” Her tone, at least, is compassionate.
“What about the donkey-braying music?”
“It’s a way to harmonize our biorhythms.”
I wait for her to stroke my ego by telling me that compared to her previous rehabilitation biorhythm partners, I’m better looking, more interesting, more special, etc. But she says nothing of the kind.
“What about the dogs?” I’m running out of things to say before she leaves.
“They started out as regular dogs. But because they’re exposed to so many patients with out-of-sync senses of time, the structures in their brain have changed.”
“I have only one last wish.” I stare at her bright eyes in the darkness, like a pair of fireflies. “Come and look at the fish in the waterways with me. Maybe they’re the only creatures in this world who live real lives.”
The fireflies brighten. She touches my face lightly. “Actually . . . ”
I silence her lips with my fingers. I shake my head. I’ve succeeded. There’s no need for her to tell me what she’s going to tell me, the three heaviest words in the world.
But she gently moves my hand away, and says three words, three different words.
“Don’t be stupid.”
I’m alone by the waterway, staring at the fish.
She’s gone, leaving behind no way to contact her. Sand pricks my palms. No matter how hard I squeeze, they slip away.
Fish, oh fish, you’re the only ones left to keep me company.
Suddenly, I feel an intense jealousy of these fish. Their lives are so simple, so pure. There’s only one direction—against the current. They do not have to hesitate, overwhelmed by an endless array of choices. But if I really lived a life like that, maybe I’d still complain. A man is never content with what he has.
Suddenly I want to spit at myself for my self-love, self-pity, self-obsession, self-self. But in the end I do nothing.
I look at one single fish: it’s pushed away from its school by the current. Once, twice, thrice. It falls behind, waves its tail madly, and returns to its position.
Fuck. It’s tough.
But wait.
Why is it always this one fish? Why is its trajectory and movement always exactly the same?
I wait, unblinking.
Two minutes later, that same little fish again drifts away from the school, again waves its tail madly, again returns to its position.
I lift the stone in my hand.
The stone falls through the holographic fish and sinks to the bottom of the waterway.
I have nothing left in my hand, not even a single grain of sand.
My rehabilitation over, I’m on my return flight with my not-so-healthy mind and not-so-happy body. The airplane hasn’t taken off yet but the cabin is already filled with snores.
I guess some people at least have been fully rehabilitated.
Suddenly the idea of returning to that concrete jungle to struggle against my fellow time-compressors disgusts me.
The plane takes off. Cities, roads, mountains, rivers—everything recedes into a small chessboard composed of parti-colored squares. In every square, time flows faster or slower. The people below throng like a nest of ants controlled by an invisible hand, divide into a few groups, are stuffed into the different squares: time flies past the laborer, the poor, the “third world”; time crawls for the rich, the idle, the “developed world”; time stays still for those in charge, the idols, the gods . . .
Suddenly, two fat hands belonging to a child appear before me, holding the entire world in them, backs of the hands up.
“Left or right?”
I look to the left and then right. I’m frightened. I have no way to pick.
Mocking laughter.
I lunge and grab both fists and force the fingers open: both are empty, both lies.
“Sir, sir!”
The pretty flight attendant wakes me. Now I finally remember the origin of that dream. It was my cousin who tormented me as a child. His favorite game was to force me to guess in which hand he had hidden the candy he took away from me. He loved to tease me because I was always hesitant, always had trouble deciding.
“Sir, would you like soda, coffee, tea or something else?”
“ . . . you.”
She blushes.
I smile at her. “I just want coffee, black.”
This is the only truly free choice I have left.
“The Fish of Lijiang” was originally published in
Science Fiction World, May 2006.
First English language publication.
Conservation of Shadows
Yoon Ha Lee
There is no such thing as conservation of shadows. When light destroys shadows, darkness does not gain in density elsewhere. When shadows steal over earth and across the sky, darkness is not diluted.
Hello, Inanna. You have seven inventory slots, all full. The seventh contains your heart, which cannot be removed. We will do our best to remedy this.
A feast awaits you at the end, sister. I am keeping it warm for you. You will be cold by the time you reach my hall beneath the floors of the world. Meadow honey on barley cakes, cheese and the tender flesh of goats; plums and pears brighter than the jewels in your hair; wine less sweet than birdsong and more bitter than tears. Taken together they form a nutritionally complete diet.
You think that all we eat in the underworld is dust and all we drink is the dregs of rain, but that is not the case. Come and share the feast.
You hesitate over the shadow-gun at your waist. Notice the holster, leather stamped with a lioness on each side. The leather comes from a lioness’s hide. She is dead, sister. She cannot aid you here.
I can’t tell you how to pass through the first gate. More accurately, I could, but I won’t. We live by different laws in the underworld, we who live at all. Now you must respect those laws as well.
The gate lies there. Your fingers move toward it, then draw back. How wise of you. Gates are hungry. They demand propitiation. Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?
No, what you feed the gate is other. It is easy for gates to be dark, maws opening to the earth’s own secrets. They wonder what light is like. So you tempt it with the jewels in your hair. Poor gate: it knows nothing about symbolism. It knows only that the tinted diamonds and emeralds and lapis lazuli glint with the evening star’s passion. Down you draw the golden pins from your dark hair and let that torrent free.
Eagerly, the gate lips at the diamonds’ fire, the emeralds’ intimation of bounty, the lapis lazuli’s memory of the sky that cannot be seen. The color leaches from the diamonds, leaving them ashen. The other stones, less hardy, crumble into dust, their virtue vanished.
Sated, the gate eats no more of you as you pass through, divested of glory yet more beautiful than ever.
The fires won’t hurt you unless you let them, sister. Hungry already? You’ll be hungrier still. Don’t roast the flesh off your bones. It’s not time yet.
Did you think the underworld moved in ignorance of summer? The season that scours the earth and fills the stomachs of those aboveground while leaving us below-ground with the rotting chaff? At least we know that we are the chaff of days, the dust of time.
It is summer because you’ve scarcely left the world above. Just think, sister: the longer you linger here, the more the leaves shrivel gold and brown on the branches; the more the last grapes wither on the vines.
Now you are hungry again, and thirsty as well. I know. I know you so well that you could flense yourself bare of face and fingerprints and still I would recognize you. After all, I recognized you the first seventy-four times you came my way.
Does it surprise you that your inventory comes up in the shape of an eight-pointed star? Blink once and it appears; twice, and it folds out of your field of vision. It reports nothing you can’t find upon you.
One slot is empty now, black as a gate, as the absence of day; black as your hair. Pick up something else if you like. Yes, that pencil will do. The graphite’s luster is dark. It grows darker yet in your grasp.
I don’t recognize the words you are writing on my walls, sister: graffiti, in scratchy bird-claw marks. Maybe you mean it to be illegible. That would be unkind.
Consider this. The seventy-four earlier iterations of you left no guide-star tags upon the walls, no cheat sheets, no maps tattooed upon their skins. Underneath your armor there is skin, the organ on which your boundaries are written. You’ll know the instant it dissolves and opens your secrets to the air.
Nothing’s left of your pencil but a stub. One point of the eight-pointed star flares diamond-bright as the inventory slot empties itself in response.
Did I speak to you of skin? The walls are my skin, the gold-painted pillars my bones. Do what you will with them. You always did.
You are silent. I don’t know whether this is an improvement or not. Do you think your words will inscribe themselves upon the air like the coming frost upon fallen leaves? Twenty degrees Celsius, room temperature. You are in a room.
There is no way out of the room, except now there is. Like a hundred mutilated lips the letters—are they letters or logograms?—crack wide, wider. Gap to gap, they gape until they dissolve into a single opening.
A wind rushes through the gate. The wind chill factor is 14 degrees Celsius. You may feel that is excessive. From that number you can calculate the speed of the wind. Unfortunately, your pencil’s stub will write no more for you. Perhaps you can do the figures in your head.
If you came to the feast, you would soon sate yourself with warm food. You would watch as dancers clad in feathers reenacted the descent of your first self, or the eighth, or the forty-ninth. How many gates do you think your sad, brave clones survived? Do not worry. You are different, you are special, more clever and greater of heart. I will make sure you reach the barley cakes brimming with dark honey.
Now you are singing. Your formants are rich with despair. Some languages can be recorded without stylus or pencil.
The gate swallows the holy sweetness of your voice. It cancels the waveform, replacing it with silence beyond imagining. Sister, you have not known silence until you have sat in the dark among the dead for generations.
You don’t know, yet you do. These are the things you sing of: the embryos of mice, stillborn, albinos that have never known light; the needle’s prick drawing blood directly from the betrayed artery; curling strands of fossil DNA, a language more legible than yours. Memory is not inherited, memory is no mirror to times past, yet you divine the experiments that I oversee here.
The gate is as still as matter ever is. Even you cannot cancel that lowest level of vibration, absolute zero thrumming. It will have to do.
Assured of the gate’s momentary toothlessness, you step through, and it lets you. Silence drifts in your wake like leaves and petals, like all things ephemeral.
This time it’s not so easy to ignore the fire, is it? Go deep enough and you’ll meet the mantle’s heat. You think of the underworld as cold and dank, inhabited by pale, eyeless creatures whose circulatory systems are written within them with ink redder than spinels. That is not the whole of us. We can kill you by fire, too.
Are you worried about dying? You shy from the fires, watch your balance on the narrow walkways. It helps to have good reflexes in death as well as life. It’s good that you practice. Of course I support your efforts.
Traverse the spiraling maze and who do you find at the center? Imagine peeling the layers of yourself away. What’s left when you reach your hallowed heart, when the hollows admit no shadows but what you carry with you? I forgot: with no voice, you can’t answer me.
Walk and walk as you may, you only knot yourself further into the maze’s pattern. Isn’t this the way of the world? From the moment you first draw breath, you’re woven into the world’s overbearing warp.
Look: the necklace at your throat responds to the fire, capturing and releasing that warm light with its own golden gleam. In this surfeit of light I can read the inscription on your eight-pointed pendant, spider-scratch marks deep in the metal. No cipher hides you from me. I have mapped you down to your mitochondria. I can read your rate of respiration, the flush of your skin. Surely the heat isn’t unbearable yet.
You unclasp the bright unknot from around your neck. Which lover gave you that necklace? Was it before or after he pressed you against the flowering earth, the leafing tree? Through the floor of the earth, I heard your demands. You were never easy to please, no matter how many lovers you dragged from bars, drugged by the honey of your voice and the heat of your mouth. Nevertheless the mares and does swelled, and the boughs curved under the weight of tender fruit.
Did the lionesses nuzzle each other, wondering over cubs to come?
Like a sleepy snake the necklace ripples over your hands, throwing bright glints across knuckles and prominent bones. I will listen when you explain to your beloved that his gift was worth nothing except as a talisman against one more nexus of shadow and insatiable envy. That’s the problem, surely: not that you discarded the gift, but that it was discarded in such small cause.
There are people who would kill for fire: fire to stoke youth in the furnace beneath their skins, fire to brighten the faded cloth of their lives. Better to die burning than chilled by slow moments into the silvered dark. No? Tell that to all those whose bones embrace beneath the worm-furrowed loam.
A narrow opal flares open in the air at the maze’s heart, narrow like a woman before she grows great with child. Were this gate a woman you could dance with her, span her with your hands—no. Instead, you fasten the necklace around the gate, adorning it as you once adorned yourself.
The gold shines with the warmth of the surrounding fires. The gate does not drain away the reflected light. Instead, darkness seeps into the inscription. You can’t turn away from the words, sister, the seething shapes of summer, hope, health inverted.
The gate offers you its embrace. Without hesitation or tenderness, you accept, ducking your head so that you are briefly crowned in gold.
Do you know how deep in the earth you are, sister? You squint in the near-dark. There is only a single lantern to comfort you. Imagine: maybe that lantern is the only thing between you and utter darkness. Shall I snuff it out? Don’t shiver so; it doesn’t become you.
The stalactites and stalagmites grip the light in their jaws, returning only washed-out, variegated colors: poor exchange for that faint gold.
You shouldn’t have sold your voice so cheaply. It makes conversation difficult. Would you like to borrow the voices that whisper in the underworld for your own? You never know who might wander here. They might remember the world’s oldest hymns. They might be praising the serpentine coils of your hair, the silent cunning of your hands. They might not know who you are at all, now that you’re stripped of your war-chariot, far from the morning star. For all the storms you dragged in your wake, all the rain-tossed days and nights, you craved light as your nourishment: star or moon, lightning scarring the shrouded sky. You always were one for fanfare.
Here are no drums to shake the stone columns and threaten you with the slow death of suffocation. Don’t worry about the air, dear sister. You breathe as darkness does, without need of oxygen or any element but your very self. Light travels through the void without a mediating aether; why should darkness be any different?
Come to my halls, sister, and there will be no more talk of light or dark or the permutations in between. We will sit side by side on our thrones, drinking young wine and old rather than the dark, dank water that trickles just beneath the world’s skin. We will bestow treasures upon those who please us, luminous cabochons and spiral emblems of gold, chains sometimes of silver and sometimes of bronze.
In the earth’s hidden hoards you can taste treasure as though it were a nectar beyond price. Underground, so deep that even fungi find no nourishment, the earth fruits metal and precious stones. It is of no concern to us that living creatures starve contemplating such fruit.
You unfasten your belt, such a short, blunt length to encircle your waist. Jewels of varying cuts are set in the leather, all polished to the brilliance of river water beneath a fecund moon. They fling colored sparks across the floor and walls. Did you ever spare a thought for the underground spirits that had to be disturbed by the digging for your treasures?
With the belt you whip the largest geode in the wall, already cracked half-open to reveal its jagged amethyst heart. The jewels fall out of your belt and scatter to the floor, uncracked yet dimmer, duller. You should be more patient, sister. After all, when you reach the final gate there will be no returning. Doesn’t the thought distress you even a little?
Heedless, you bunch up the belt in your fist, then thrust it into the gate that is growing from the crack in the geode. Is that how you regard the underworld’s gleaming treasures? Obstacles to be destroyed?
I suppose I haven’t learned anything that I didn’t already know. You are all the same, all of you.
The geode’s teeth scratch your skin as you enter, even through the stiff curves of your armor.
This deep in the earth, you can’t hear the seasons breathing even in your dreams. Tell me true: when you close your eyes, can you smell the earthy sweetness of rotting leaves, or taste the last fruits of fall? If I set before you a feast of the finest wines and hearty porridge and roast boar, would it taste like the dust that surrounds you?
