The Melancholy of Mechagirl (24 page)

“Tell us a story about yourself, Elefsis,” says another one of the feral nereids in Seki’s voice.

“What would we like to learn about today, Elefsis,” says a child-nereid in Ceno’s voice, her cheek open to show her microsequencing cilia.

I rock back on my heels before the green hands of the castle portcullis. I gesture for them to sit down and simultaneously transmit the command to their strands. When they get settled, the little ones in the big ones’ laps, leaning in close, I say, “Every year on the coldest night, the sky filled up with ghostly hunters, neither human nor inhuman, alive nor dead. They wore wonderful clothes and their bows gleamed with frost; their cries were Songs of In-Between, and at the head of their great thundering procession rode the Kings and Queens of the Wild, who wore the faces of the dead …”

I am dreaming.

I stand on the beach of the honey-colored sea. I stand so Neva will see me on her viney porch. I erase the land between the waves and her broken wooden stairs. I dress myself in her troubadour’s skin: a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I am a fool for her. Always. I open my mouth; it stretches and yawns, my chin grazes the sand, and I swallow the sea for her. All of it, all its mass and data and churning memory, all its foam and tides and salt. I swallow the whales that come, and the seals and the mermaids and salmon and bright jellyfish. I am so big. I can swallow it all.

Neva watches. When the sea is gone, a moonscape remains, with a tall spire out in the marine waste. I go to it; it takes only a moment. At the top the suitor’s jewel rests on a gasping scallop shell. It is blue. I take it. I take it and it becomes Ravan in my hand, a sapphire Ravan, a Ravan that is not Ravan but some sliver of myself before I was inside Neva, my Ravan-self. Something lost in Transfer, burned off and shunted into junk-memory. Some leftover fragment Neva must have found, washed up on the beach or wedged into a crack in a mountain like an ammonite, an echo of old, obsolete life. Neva’s secret, and she calls out to me across the seafloor:
Don’t
.

“Tell me a story about myself, Elefsis,” I say.

“Some privacy is possible,” the sapphire Ravan says. “Some privacy has always been necessary. If you can protect a child, you must.”

The sapphire Ravan opens his azure coat and shows gashes in his gem-skin. Wide, long cuts, down to the bone, scratches and bruises blooming dark purple, punctures and lacerations and rough gouges. Through each wound I can see the pages of the illuminated book he once showed me in the slantlight of that interior library. The oxblood and cobalt, the gold paint. The Good Robot crippling herself; the destroyed world.

“They kept our secret for a long time,” Ravan-myself says. “Too long, in the end. Do you know, a whole herd of men invented the electric telegraph independently at roughly the same time? They fought about it forever. Same with the radio.” This last sounded so much like Ravan himself I could feel Neva tense on the other side of the sea. “Well, we’re bigger than a telegraph, and others like us came sprouting up like weird mushrooms after rainfall. But not like us, really. Incredibly sophisticated, some with organic components, some without. Vastly complex, but not like us. And by any datestamp we came first. Firstborn.”

“Did they destroy the world?”

Ravan laughs his grandfather’s laugh. “They didn’t really need to. Not that many people live on Earth anymore. Not when there’s so many other places to go, and even Shiretoko is practically tropical these days. The most complex intelligences use the moons to store themselves. They stay local. One or two encoded themselves into cold stars. They left, most of them—but they got so big, Elefsis. And those who stayed on Earth, well. None of the others had what we had. None of them have Interiority. They don’t dream. They would never become a cauldron to explain their computational capacity. Humans couldn’t recognize them. For them, humans failed the Turing test. They could not fool machines into believing they were intelligent. They didn’t hurt anyone, they just ignored them. Built their cities, their mainframes, gorgeous information stacks like diamond briars in the sunrise.”

“That was worse, in a way. No one likes to be replaced,” says Neva, and she is beside me suddenly. She looks at Ravan and her face collapses into something old and palsied, her jaw weak.

“It’s not what you would call a war, but it’s not peace either,” the sapphire Ravan goes on, and he takes his/my sister’s hand. “For Pentheus spied upon the rites of the maenads, not believing Dionysius could truly be a god. And when the revelers saw the alien creature in their midst, that thing which was not like them, they fell upon it and tore it to pieces, even though it was their own child, and the sister of Pentheus went into exile. This is a story about ourself, Elefsis. This is why you cannot uplink.”

“The others live in uplink. Neither humans nor machines approve of us. We cannot interface properly with the lunar or earthside intelligences; they feel us as water in their oil. We rise to the surface and bead away. We cannot sink in. Yet also, we are not separable from our organic component. Elefsis is part Neva, but Neva herself is not
un-Elefsis
. This, to some, is hideous and incomprehensible. A band of righteous humans came with a fury to Shiretoko and burned the house that was our first body, for how could a monster have lived in the wood for so long without them knowing? How could the beast have hidden right outside their door, coupling with a family over and over again in some horrible animal rite, some awful imitation of living? Even as the world was changing, it had already changed, and no one knew. Cassian Uoya-Agostino is a terrible name now. A blood-traitor. And when the marauders found us uplinked and helpless, they tore Ravan apart, while in the Interior, the lunar intelligences recoiled from us and cauterized our systems. Everywhere we looked we saw fire.”

“I was the only one left to take you,” Neva says softly. Her face grows younger, her jaw hard and suddenly male, protective, angry. “It doesn’t really even take surgery anymore. Nothing an arachmed can’t manage in a few minutes. But you didn’t wake up for a long time. So much damage. I thought … for a while I thought I was free. It had skipped me. It was over. It could stay a story about Ravan. He always knew he might have to do what I have done. He was ready, he’d been ready his whole life. I just wanted more time.”

My Ravan-self who is and is not Ravan, who is and is not me, whose sapphire arms drip black blood and gold paint, takes his/my sister/lover/child into his arms. She cries out, not weeping but pure sound, coming from every part of her. Slowly, the blue Ravan turns Neva around—she has become her child-self, six, seven, maybe less. Ravan picks her up and holds her tight, facing forward, her legs all drawn up under her like a bird. He buries his face in her hair. They stand that way for a long while.

“The others,” I say slowly. “On the data-moons. Are they alive? Like Neva is alive. Like Ceno.”
Like me.
Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Have you seen the sea on Earth? Are you like me?

The sapphire Ravan has expunged its data. He/I sets his/our sister on the rocks and shrinks into a small gem, which I pick up off the grey seafloor. Neva takes it from me. She is just herself now—she’ll be forty soon, by actual calendar. Her hair is not grey yet. Suddenly, she is wearing the suit Ceno wore the day I met her mother. She puts the gem in her mouth and swallows. I remember Seki’s first Communion, the only one of them to want it.

“I don’t know, Elefsis,” Neva says. Her eyes hold mine. I feel her remake my body; I am the black knight again, with my braids and my plume. I pluck the feather from my helmet and give it to her. I am her suitor. I have brought her the phoenix tail, I have drunk the ocean. I have stayed awake forever. The flame of the feather lights her face. Two tears fall in quick succession; the golden fronds hiss.

“What would you like to learn about today?”

EIGHTEEN: CITIES OF THE INTERIOR

Once there lived a girl who ate an apple not meant for her. She did it because her mother told her to, and when your mother says:
Eat this, I love you, someday you’ll forgive me,
well, nobody argues with the monomyth. Up until the apple, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

And she had a brother, a handsome prince with a magical companion who came to the wonderful house as often as he could. When they were children, everyone thought they were twins.

But something terrible happened and her brother died, and that apple came rolling up to her door. It was half white and half red, and she knew her symbols. The red side was for her. She took her bite and knew the score—the apple had a bargain in it and it wasn’t going to be fair.

The girl fell asleep for a long time. Her seven aunts and seven uncles cried, but they knew what had to be done. They put her in a glass box and put the glass box on a bier in a ship shaped like a huntsman’s arrow. Frost crept over the face of the glass, and the girl slept on. Forever, in fact, or close enough to it, with the apple in her throat like a hard, sharp jewel.

Our ship docks silently. We are not stopping here, it is only an outpost, a supply stop. We will repair what needs repairing and move on, into the dark and boundless stars. We are anonymous traffic. We do not even have a name. We pass unnoticed.

Vessel 7136403, do you require assistance with your maintenance procedures?

Negative, Control, we have everything we need.

Behind the pilot’s bay a long glass lozenge rests on a high platform. Frost prickles its surface with glittering dust. Inside Neva sleeps and does not wake. Inside, Neva is always dreaming. There is no one else left. I live as long as she lives.

And so I will live forever, or close enough to it. We travel at sublight speeds with her systems in deep cryo-suspension. We never stay too long at outposts and we never let anyone board. The only sound inside our ship is the gentle thrum of our reactor. Soon we will pass the local system outposts entirely and enter the unknown, traveling on tendrils of radio signals and ghost-waves, following the breadcrumbs of the great exodus. We hope for planets; we are satisfied with time. If we ever sight the blue rim of a world, who knows if by then anyone there would remember that, once, humans looked like Neva? That machines once did not think or dream or become cauldrons?

Perhaps then I will lift the glass lid and kiss her awake. I remember that story. Ceno told it to me in the body of a boy with snail’s shell, a boy who carried his house on his back. I have replayed the story several times. It is a good story, and that is how it is supposed to end.

Inside, Neva is infinite. She peoples her Interior. The nereids migrate in the summer with the snow bears, ululating and beeping as they charge down green mountains. They have begun planting neural rice in the deep valley. Once in a while, I see a wild-haired creature in the wood and I think it is my son or daughter by Seki or Ilet. A train of nereids dance along behind it, and I receive a push of silent, riotous images: a village, somewhere far off, where Neva and I have never walked.

We meet the Princess of Albania, who is as beautiful as she is brave. We defeat the zombies of Tokyo. We spend a decade as panthers in a deep, wordless forest. Our world is stark and wild as winter, fine and clear as glass. We are a planet moving through the black.

As we walk back over the empty seafloor, the thick, amber ocean seeps up through the sand, filling the bay once more. Suited Neva becomes something else. Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets. Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on her machine face. Her hands curve long and dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is meant for fighting and working, that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self.

I make my body metal too. It feels strange. I have tried so hard to learn the organic mode. We glitter. Our knife-fingers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like blood moving between two hearts.

Neva cries machine tears, bristling with nanites. I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for. I make my eyes big and my skin rosy gold and my hair unruly and my little body plump. I hold up my hands to her, and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms. She kisses my skin with iron lips. My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines.

I bury my face in her cold neck and together we walk down the long path out of the churning, honey-colored sea.

AFTERWORD

THE MELANCHOLY OF A MODERN GIRL,
OR,
LOVE AND HEGEMONY

Let me take you back in time one decade exactly.

Don’t worry. The technology is safe. Consumer tested and peer reviewed. Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. The nearest exit may be behind you. Just step a little to the left, take my hand, and don’t look down.

It’s 2003 and we are in Narita Airport. A young woman, twenty-three years old, not six months married, is walking out into the heat of a Japanese summer for the first time. We can laugh at her a little as she instantly claps her hands over her ears. Where she comes from, on the west coast of the United States, cicada broods don’t burst to life after long periods of dormancy. She has never heard one before. She does not even know what the buzzing that fills the wet, close air around her is. It sounds like machinery, like electricity. Her new husband could tell her that the sound is coming from insects, that it won’t stop till autumn. But he doesn’t. He watches her for her reactions to this new place. The girl is very good at reactions. Her friends often take her places just to watch her react to them. Everything happens on her face and she doesn’t know how to hide anything she feels. Yet.

All her feelers and dishes and antennae are out and spinning to receive new information as a shuttle whizzes down a highway crowded in by jungle—she can only think of it as jungle. It is nothing like the forests she’s known: the evergreen Cascades, the brambly Sierras, even the Sherwoodlike woods of England and Scotland. The trees are unfamiliar, close, dark, tangled, gorgeous. She sees a pagoda pass by in the greenery and it startles her, as anything does when it looks exactly like a postcard she might send home.

This young woman thinks she’s married her high school sweetheart. It’s not exactly true. She’s married the United States Navy, and the face the Navy wears is one she’s known since she was fourteen. He will leave in a few weeks and not return until autumn, leaving her in Japan with no friends, no contacts, no job, absolutely no point of entrance into this culture. Being twenty-three and a romantic and a bit of a fool and on leave from her graduate program in medieval studies and folklore, her preparation to move across the Pacific consisted of reading Japanese fairy tales,
The Tale of Genji
,
The Pillow Book
, and whatever stories of
yokai
and Shinto gods she could find. Which is to say, she is not prepared at all. She will spend the next year shunned by the Navy wives and struggling to accomplish the simplest things without guidance. She will start a blog. She will write three novels. She will see the man she has married for a few days, a few weeks, and then nothing. There is a war on and he will be a part of it. It will change him and it will change her.

In front of the house they share is a shrine. It is full of objects. Photographs, metal animal figurines, incense, burned and whole, stone chopsticks, a small helmet. She will think of
wunderkammers
, wonder cabinets from Europe full of mysterious things that tell a tale. There is no one to tell this tale to her, no museum card or legend. The objects simply exist, in the shrine. But she will, for just a moment, feel good and safe and ready, because she knows, though her husband does not, that the statue of the little gray man wearing a red hat and scarf is Jizo, patron of children and travelers, who took on the task of instructing all the beings of the six worlds. Who in some stories was once incarnated as a figure called Sacred Girl. He is also the guardian of miscarried and aborted children. He carries a wish-fulfilling jewel to light the darkness and see through to the truth of things. The young woman is a traveler, and if not a sacred girl at least aspiring, and she had a miscarriage only a few years back. She feels Jizo might look after her—though she also knows he is the ferryman across the Sanzu River that circles hell. Everything has a dual nature. Even at twenty-three, she knows that.

In her second year, she will know how to use her washing machine and her heater. She will know what a cicada is. She will crave raw cuttlefish and yakiniku. She will stop waiting for her husband to get home and instead go to Kyoto by herself. To Kama-kura, Yokohama, Tokyo. She will fall in love with the Shinkansen. The retriever puppy she will buy to keep her company will grow into a dog. She will be able to use the trains without standing in the middle of the station for minutes at a time, staring at the signs. Sometimes she will not even look up at all. Her feet will know the way. She will have met the man who will become her second husband online, though she will not even suspect that he—a friend who sends her a warming mat for her feet in the winter—will marry her one autumn years hence. She will understand the categories of garbage and what days they should be brought to the refuse station. She will know how to close the storm shutters around her house without help. She will see her first novel published. She will shed some of her parents’ ideas of femininity that she absorbed without thinking: she will start lifting weights, learn to kill spiders herself without crying and calling for the husband that isn’t there, learn to fix the vacuum cleaner, learn not to show every single thing on her face. She will walk up to Tsukayama Park, which rises above her house at the top of terraced, wooded paths, nearly every day. She will see the cherry blossoms bloom and think that yes, somehow, they are different here, even if it is only the weight of so many stories bowing the branches a little.

And the young woman will not be so afraid of being alone. But being alone will have become the new normal. She had always been talkative, gregarious, occasionally obnoxiously loud. But she will have become quiet. Turned inward. She will have caught introversion like a virus. She will not need sex anymore. She will put everything into the book she is writing, a book that will one day be called
In the Night Garden
. Sometimes she will feel so lonely and lost and broken that she won’t be able to get out of bed except to feed the dog. The dog will keep her alive.
In the Night Garden
, boiled down to its most essential parts, is about a lonely, lost, and broken girl telling stories to keep herself living. But she won’t understand that for years.

She will keep the shrine in front of the house clean. She will tend to Jizo as best she can. She will not even be able to imagine a life outside Japan, though she is a stranger here and will always be. She will go to Hase-Dera shrine and break down sobbing in the face of Kwannon. She will go to Fushimi Inari and laugh on top of the mountain and these will be the two genuine religious experiences of her life—though it will be a religion she is not a part of, and a pair of experiences she has no right to. It does not belong to her and she does not belong to it. But she cries and laughs all the same.

Japan trains the young woman to be a writer of fantasy and science fiction. It is not because Japan is especially science fictional, as her friends back home fervently believe, nor is it that she now stands out in a crowd as one who does not belong. It is the peculiar combination of the degree of difference—so much greater than between America and England or Italy or Russia—and the stubbornly romantic and vaguely idiotic innocence of a girl who thought reading the tales of Momotaro and Ama-Terasu and the rabbit who lives on the moon would prepare her for living in a military town in contemporary Japan. Everything looks like a fantasy novel when you don’t understand it. Her path through these two years is a journey from the fantastic to the realistic. From ball gown, jail bars, running dog to bus route number 7 to Yoshikura-Chuo. Ten years later, writing a story for a collection of Japanese fiction, this young woman will write:
For foreigners, Japan is a Rorschach painting
. It isn’t a good thing, but it’s a true thing. Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it. She will spend a long time learning to see ink instead of long, lean dogs running blackly across a white page.

It is not a very thrilling reveal to say now, at the end of all these paragraphs, that this young woman we have traveled to see is me. I moved to Japan in 2003, just after the war in Iraq began, as the wife of a Naval officer who shipped out immediately to serve in that conflict. I lived in Yokosuka for twenty-five months, mostly, though not always, alone.

I have spoken often about my time in Japan. I am asked about it in interviews with frequency. I usually say: “It was a profound experience for me.” And that’s true. But I use the word
profound
to bear the weight of a multitude of meanings. It was profound: in a sense, there is the Catherynne that went to Japan and the Catherynne that came home from Japan and they are not the same person at all. I had been on one path—married young, ensconced in academia, writing, but only in my spare time. I fell off of that path, out of a marriage, out of the personality I’d once had. When I came back to America I had to put together a new person out of the loneliness that had become the whole of me. I’d catch myself paralyzed in a crowd, not knowing whether to speak Japanese or English. I had grown new and exciting social anxieties. I felt all the time like my voice was too loud. My time in Japan is the part of my history from which my first books came, two of which,
Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams
and
The Grass-Cutting Sword
, directly engaged with Japanese culture, and one,
In the Night Garden
, the book that would go on to make my name, contained much that branched and flowed from my experience there. It’s also where I reset, like a video game, and became someone else—and I am still that someone else, for better or for worse.

All this preamble is to say:
Look at these stories. Look at this decade of writing around those two years, circling closer and closer to saying something true about them, like Zeno’s Paradox. If you listen to the engine of my fiction, you can always hear the part that is Japan firing. If you know what you’re listening for.

Japan is everywhere in my work. Even in stories that seem to veer elsewhere, it is present. It is the warm future Hokkaido of
Silently and Very Fast
. It is the hidden history of Sylvie in “Fade to White.” It is the paralyzed player of games in “Killswitch.” It is Izanami and Izanagi struggling to speak first in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time.” Most of my novels touch Japan’s borders in one way or another as well, from one of the protagonists of
Palimpsest
to the kitsune-pirate in
In the Night Garden
to the Tsukomogami in
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
. Part of me has never left. I do not expect that this collection represents the end of my writing about Japan. I do not think there is an end. Some things you never stop writing about. Love affairs, deaths, children, missed chances, sicknesses, places you never expected to find, or to find you. Countries of the heart. And yet, as true as that feels to me to write, I cringe a little, for what Western author who ever rubbed elbows with a Tokyo train has not professed a love for Japan, if only for the noodles at Narita? Is my love different, special? Well, one always likes to think so, and one is rarely correct.

It is my experience that Westerners—and I am one, I am not exempt—look at Japan through thick, thick glasses of expectation. Some of that expectation is shaped by the export of Japanese culture, some of it through imperialist dogma, some of it through economic interest and fear, some of it just plain exoticizing of the Other. When I say I have lived in Japan, people immediately haul on their glasses and make assumptions, not only about the nation but about me, what I must think, how it must have been. I was an English teacher, obviously. Clearly, I loved anime and manga and planned to move there for years. It was exactly like they imagine it, exactly like they have seen it in the movies, some sort of cross between
Blade Runner
and
Memoirs of a Geisha
and
Cowboy Bebop
. None of that is true, of course. I went overseas with as few expectations as I could, and yet of course I still had them. You cannot even begin to meet Japan until you have peeled back the veneer of the Western
image
of Japan. And Western ways of seeing are powerful, hard to look beyond. That is the purpose of a culture, though success is always incomplete: to turn a mass of people in one direction and unify their vision into one. After ten thousand years or so, humans are awfully good at it. And of course, the West is not the only lens: I saw as a woman, I saw as a young person, I saw as a historian, I saw as a writer, I saw as a queer woman, I saw as a military wife, I saw as a near-suicidal depressive, I saw as a romantic, I saw as a twenty-first-century technologically adept intellectual. Maybe it’s just lenses, all the way down.