Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

The video cuts out. I’m left staring at an empty space, feeling sorrow for a woman who died a long time ago, one way or another.

Then the meaning of her words starts to sink in, and I feel so light my whole body might be made out of billowing silk. Oh, of course. I want to laugh, and then I do laugh, and I keep laughing, harder and more raucous, until I realize Mouth is staring.

I start to explain what Olivia said, but Mouth understood most of it. Her nomads used Noölang for everything sacred.

“Why would they let us watch that?” Mouth says.

“Because they wanted to make sure we understood what they plan to do with us: give us their gift of communication.”

“Okay, so how do we defend ourselves… I mean, I told you, I can’t fight anymore. And even if I could—”

“I want this.” I take Mouth’s shoulders and look into her wide-open eyes. “I’m going to say yes. I need to talk to the Gelet as an equal. And I am so tired of using this clumsy human voice. I never even liked talking. People lie every time they speak. I can finally understand, and be understood, and oh, of course I am going to do this! I have never wanted anything half as much.”

“But your humanity!” Mouth grips the side of the computer table with both hands. “I mean, you can’t let go of—”

“Did you actually read any of Mayhew’s writing? Back when you were pretending to be a young radical?” I ignore Mouth’s squirming, because we’re past that now. “He talked a lot about human nature. We can’t stay the same forever. New world, new people.”

Mouth startles me by quoting from Mayhew’s Treatise on Inhumanity, almost verbatim: “‘We measure the freedom of human beings by their ability to change with their environment. The only truly alien influence is the dead grasping fingers of our own past.’ But still, stop and think. You’ll be throwing away everything…” She pauses and looks down at her boots. “You know what? I’m the worst person to give anybody advice. Do what you want.”

“Thank you.”

All this hope catches me off-balance. I’m scared, too—what if they kill me by accident? What if I look hideous to other humans? But this is worth any risk. Everything I’ve lost and suffered, all of it will be a cheap price if this works.

“But there’s no way I’m letting them do that to me,” Mouth says.

“I don’t think you should. The one time you tried to communicate with them, you couldn’t handle it. Any more than the others.” I flinch at the memory of the scavengers, arguing about whether there should be a Spoon to go with the Knife. I’ll never stop blaming myself for that bloodbath, even if the Gelet have forgiven me. I need to do better. And now, maybe I can.

I sit in three-quarter darkness, holding conversations with Bianca in my head. “Don’t go,” I tell her. “You don’t want to go home. You want to go back to being the person you used to be. Even if you succeed in conquering Xiosphant with a handful of foreigners, you’ll only be killing what’s left of your old self. Come with me to the Gelet city. We’ll sit in the dark and ask each other stupid questions, and keep each other warm.” But even an imaginary Bianca won’t listen to me. She’s probably dead by now.

I’m not ready for how much I miss people, after always wishing I could escape from them. I hear Mouth grumbling in the opposite corner, but I’ve never been this far from a crowd before. Their loud voices, the inadvertent touches, and the scraps of personal information that people always give in passing. All the tiny ways that people help each other to exist.

Food appears from time to time, dropped in my lap from someplace: weird pastes that feel clammy in my mouth but warm in my stomach; roots; and, once or twice, some freeze-dried rations from the Mothership, still edible after so long. I sleep a lot, on a makeshift bed of old survival gear.

At last some Gelet come and herd me into a cavernous space, whose dimensions I only discern because of the echoes of my own stumbles. Every time I move, I almost topple. One of these Gelet puts her pincer around my face, the first time they’ve done this since I came inside the city, and shows me what they plan to do: an array of dark spikes going into soft flesh, and a cradle of bone being pried apart with great care. I see things that look like worms and blobs of fat being stuffed inside a cavity that wasn’t meant to hold them. Skin being reshaped.

I understand: This will be painful. This will be impossible to undo. They’ll need to take me apart and reassemble me, and they cannot guarantee mastery.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Do it. I want that. Please. Yes.”

They can’t tell that I’m agreeing, so I spread my arms as wide as I can, indicating openness.

“I’m ready. I want to be able to speak to you. I want to be part of your society. Let’s do this.”

I keep broadcasting eagerness, as loud as I can. I can’t contemplate that kind of pain, let alone the disfigurement, without going stiff with fear. But I know for sure, this is what I came here for.

Even when they take me into the chamber and remove all my clothing, exposing me to a chill, leavened by heat from deep-running springs, I don’t flinch. When they offer some sedatives from some old human medi-kit, I take them eagerly. In a half doze, I have inklings that they’re opening me up and taking away pieces, somewhere below my floating head. The drugs help me not to mind, but I don’t mind in any case. They can take anything, as long as they give me what they promised.

When they finish remaking me, they seal up my insides, while one of them envelopes my forehead in her pincer, tenderly, showing me a comforting memory (dream?) of a snowdrift being rearranged, slowly, by a languid wind that moves tons of loose powder in ornate whorls. Kilometers of bright lace, in constant motion.

Mouth sat in one of the Gelet’s weird sticky hammocks and heard their limbs scuttling in the trails going up and down outside the room where she was resting up. They had left a stack of old human books in here, and she’d read a couple of them in the meager illumination. Mouth didn’t think she was a prisoner, exactly, but if she wandered out into the Gelet city, she’d just get lost, or wind up in total darkness. And the thought of exploring this hive filled Mouth with dread. The Citizens had been fond of dread, which they’d viewed as a profound spiritual rapture that suffused your whole body, even to the hairs on your skin and the arches of your feet. Dread lasted longer, and went deeper, than awe or joy.

Mouth couldn’t force her mind to accept that she was in this alien place, with its hissing turbines and its swarming creatures. Instead, she tried to picture Alyssa sitting down here with her, and to guess what Alyssa would say about all this.

Maybe Mouth and Alyssa had never seen each other clearly. Mouth had always thought of Alyssa as a fully formed person who had already made all her big choices. But really, Alyssa had been a kid when they’d first met, and Mouth had only lately known Alyssa as an adult. She’d been trying to step up and become a boss for ages, but her relationship with Mouth had remained stuck in their old dynamic. And maybe she’d always cling to the impression of Mouth that she had formed as a wild-eyed girl with messy hair, leaving home for the first time.

Two pairs of snapping pincers appeared next to Mouth’s hammock, and a tentacle brushed her skin. She flinched but didn’t try to pull away. Up close, without the deafening wind, she could hear the teeth clicking in the wide mouth, and see the oily secretion glistening on the grubs in between the pincers. The Gelet smelled like damp cloth and fresh-baked bread, and they didn’t have “heads” at all. Instead, these protrusions rose over their front legs, like your thumb climbs out of your wrist, and culminated in those two big indentations that seemed to change shape, looking sad or wistful or mirthful as the light shifted.