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.