Being an Account of chaotropaic Events at Janartash, and their Consequences
15 Arhu-tisritu, 368 YD, evening
My dearest friend,
You told me once that your fondest wish, having spent much so much of your youth in study, was to travel; to see something, as you said then, really new.
I do not share your mania for the unfamiliar. My decision to take up my current post with the Sanction as agent of Estuary’s philosophical interests in Janartash, was ever pragmatic. Those of us with neither money nor family name to hold the door must needs make a lockpick of our own ambition.
When grim necessity drove me from the warmth of the Institute—from you—, I swore: this monstrous self-exile would be the making of me.
Now I am fair full to bursting. I cannot speak of my designs in Janartash, & yet I must tell some-one. It could only be you. I have laid bare my inner-most heart to you upon the marble slab, & yet you have remained by my side (in affection, if not in place). Now that I am poised on the brink of something truly remarkable, I can think of no better witness.
At last, I have made the discovery that will secure my future & assure my reputation.
I can see your face now, poised between fondness & censure. You accuse me of “quizzing” you, you chide me for my long silence, & yet—oh yes, I know you well!—& yet. You wish to know what it is that I have done.
Patience, my dear. In order to truly understand the scope of my great work, here on the margins of chaos, I must give you to understand something of the nature of Janartash & of the Inclusion Zone itself, whose edges lie only thirty ûsh distant to the settlement. Perhaps then you will forgive me, when I explain why we must yet remain parted for some little while more.
Some days gone, I noticed that the recent heavy rains had occasioned the unusually rapid growth of a cluster of spindly fern-like trees only a few ûsh beyond the fence. Their bark was astonishing: a luminous shell-pink, the precise color of the delicate membrane of the inner eye. Their leaves, of a gossamer thinness, moved in secret winds; the branches heavy with unfamiliar fruits. I waited for another to remark this novelty. When they did not, I determined that my colleagues, all of whom have been at their posts since the beginning, no longer conceived of these chaotropes as any-thing worthy of notice. In spite of their routine indifference, I determined to mount a solitary expedition to examine the specimens in person.
I saw in the grove the opportunity to train my anatomist’s eye more closely upon the Inclusion’s mysteries. How quickly that ambition was turned against me!
The trek across the marsh was easy enough, though I noted an unusually high level of insect activity for the time of year. Rotfly & skimmers, primarily. I didn’t think much of it at the time; now I rather wish I had.
I did not smell the trees until I was among them. Even the most dispassionate anatomist must have a strong stomach for his work; I flatter myself that mine is stronger than most. Even so, I retched. The smell of the charnel house, a putrescence that all our embalming salts & spirits of sandarac can barely hold at bay. I might have turned back, ambition be damned, if my eye had not been drawn by the way that the pendulous red fruits caught the light. Even in the dry air, they looked almost wet. I could only conclude that the fruits were somehow producing moisture themselves. In other words, seeping. Burying my nose in my pocket handkerchief, I leaned forward for a closer look. In looking, saw: The delicate gossamer transparency that I had admired was not the botanical habitus of leaves but of thinly flayed, unmelanated skin. The heavy fruit was striated & pulsed beneath my gaze; it dripped thickly red. Not fruit, but flesh. Muscle.
The principles of experimental philosophy fled from me in that moment. I retreated to the safety of the Sanction’s metal walls, gorge in my throat.
Upon return, I felt that I would be quite happy to be relieved of my post, never to set eyes upon chaotrope nor mixling again. If, at that moment, you had made again your offer of last spring—at the time so offensive to my ambition—I would have accepted in the space between two heartbeats. I would have taken any position, no matter how meager its appeal to my intellect, if it came with passage on the next barge out.
I watched the scatter of clouds across the green face of the moon until at last I fell into an uneasy sleep. But—thank Providence!—the Inclusion saw fit to spare me further horrors that night.
How strange! I can recall that period of anxious unreality so clearly; yet only days later, I look upon the memory as a voyeur. How fully my sentiments have changed!
But now the day grows late, my room dark with shadow, & I have not even begun to tell that which drove me at last to my pen! Well, dearest, you will have to wait a little while longer for your letter. I will not send it until I have had chance to finish the story, for what meager amusements it may provide.
For now I am only,
Your dearest, & humblest servant,
S.
16 Arhu-tisritu, 368 YD, morning
Well, my dear, it is a new day!
Even Janartash cannot help but be a little warmed by morning’s light. In these early, quiet moments, I find myself almost liking this lonely place. The six daughters, oft-dimmed by the haze of urban industry, are here each as clear and distinctly placed as mother sun herself. Perhaps I might show it to you, one day.
But I will not idle away precious moments in meteorology. I will continue.
Our object of study, here in Janartash, is the chaotropaic mechanism itself, the agentive force behind the remarkable changes in form observed after the eruption of the Pashulla borehole.
Were you at the Institute, that day when M. Uwaina performed the mixling vivisection? I search the crowd in my memory but I do not find your face. Is the sight of the chaotropaic tissue writhing away from the good marazjie’s scalpel engrained as deeply in you as it is in me?
Once the mechanism is fully understood, we hope to significantly improve worker productivity within the Inclusion Zone. You can only imagine the difficulty of managing the Lummary population now, while we operate purely on guesswork: how debilitating the first changes will be; how long before a worker has reached the “point of no return.”
Recent discoveries at Janartash have led some to suggest miasma as a cause. Miasma satisfies in every arena but one: why those of us who remain within the boundaries of Janartash remain unaffected even as the winds pass directly through the Inclusion Zone & howl most miserably through our narrow streets.
Mi. Lamilya, who assists in the work of post-mortem sectioning, believes that Janartash itself is protected by some apotropaic barrier, the consequence of a ritual enacted by the Lummary state magicians during the period—before Estuary’s sphere expanded to encompass the territories of the northern marsh—when Janartash was the site of the Lummary “capital city.” (Tho’ the settlement was not yet Janartash, as the Lummary do not name places in our way, preferring instead to locate objects in reference to themselves—”my home,” “my town,” and so on—as children laying claim to a toy). Impossible, of course. The Lummary would have needed fore-knowledge of the chaotrope long before the incident at Pashulla. But one must forgive Mi. Lamilya: she has Lummary blood through the maternal line, & drank deeply of superstition at the breast.
Keshar, our alchymist, believes that some trait or tendency passed down in the blood conditions for the chaotropaic mechanism. But why then did all those immediately proximate to the initial event at Pashulla—Lummary and Eshtur alike—succumb to such rapid transformations that all but two died of the stresses within days?
I myself—among others—believe the chaotropaic mechanism depends on both concentration & exposure. We have begun to identify alchymical & chirurgical avenues by which prolonged exposure might be mitigated. If our researches can but mitigate the worst effects, our efforts here will be deemed by many a complete success. I, however, aspire—could you think otherwise?—to greater understanding. In time, I hope that we might know the Inclusion so intimately that its whims might be turned to our own service. Imagine it: effecting precise changes in the body down to the smallest level. To what uses those bodies might be put!
How remarkable a thing is holy Providence! How close I came to missing my chance entirely. If M. Kurakand—my superior (self-appointed) in every-thing but intellect & ambition—had not been brought low by an unfortunately tainted admixture of the herbal tonic at which he incessantly slurps, then it would have been he, not I, who descended into Janartash’s grim streets, chirurgie kit in hand. That would have been a great loss to experimental philosophy; he does not have my scope of vision. Still, I am glad that he was overcome quickly, & that his exposure was cut short. (I did not know until after that he has a congenital weakness of the heart, rendering him particularly sensitive to deliriant toxin.) All his colleagues within the Sanction are relieved that his malady is not too severe; he improves daily. I personally assumed responsibility for several more involved cases, in order that poor Kurakand might take rest.
One of those cases has laid my path clear.
The first season of my appointment is very nearly come to a close, with little enough to show for it. My daily labors are banal, my contributions unrecognized, & every-where my ambitions stifled by the petty tyrannies of Kurakand & others of that class. Even now, the featureless streets remain as nonsensical as when I first arrived.
Then Kurakand came to grief, & all my fortunes changed. I found myself picking my way with no real confidence through that portion of the settlement given over largely to barracks. My errand was in service of the experiment to which I have just alluded, an effort to dampen the effects of the Inclusion through alchymical means.
Kurakand, as I’m sure you have gathered even through my attempts at even-handed diplomacy, had proven himself a colleague in name only; though he judged me equal to the rôle of dogsbody, he shared his thoughts rarely & sought counsel from me never. Luckily for the cause of experimental philosophy, I had the measure of the man early, & quickly ascertained the place where he hid his research notes.
Through my late-night perusals of same, I uncovered that he & that bastard Keshar had developed a working prototype of organic tubing (cultured from a vivisected mixling whose arterial matrix had taken on some of the fibrous qualities of cellulose, less inimical to the body than glass or oilcloth), phials, & intravenous shunts, designed to filter its bearer’s blood, while delivering a sustained dosage of salutary medicament. A neat bit of work, though childish in both design and construction. Ere I was out of the Sanction compound, I had construed a series of improvements, which I intended to put into place immediate upon my return.
For all my theoretical expertise, however, I had not yet performed the procedure. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I approached my destination: a rude shack at the very edge of Janartash, with view of silt and rushes beyond the border-fence. The pink flames of Pashulla danced in the distance.
The door opened to my knock. My first impression was of a darkness. When finally my eyes made sense of the sight before me, I staggered.
Not all mixlings are created equal. A rash of scales, or briars growing in where the nails should be, is nothing at all to a common laborer. Some changes—webbed hands and feet, or the growth of a nictitating membrane—may even prove beneficial, particularly in the mining populations. Others, however, are nothing so nice: I have seen a man whose intestines became a nest of snakes, which then devoured him alive. But abominations of such a magnitude are far more the exception than the rule. The more common physiognomy is characterized by a subtle wrongness, an ugliness that repels both eye & mind. Only by lingering upon the flesh can one become alert to the signs of Inclusion: fingers lengthened or shortened, eyes that blink too much or not at all, chitinous growths about the head & chest. By the time the mixling has sprouted a pair of moth-like wings that bleed incessantly, or awakened one morning with the head of a bird so heavy that it crushes the throat & lungs, the unfortunate creature is usually beyond helping.
But here stood one of the most coherent chaotropaic hybridizations that I had ever seen. She towered three, even four cubits above me, her head—entirely human, but for a sort of piebald white patterning against the darker clay of her skin, spreading down her face & neck until it disappeared beneath the neck of her garment—nearly brushing the wooden beams of the ceiling. From the waist up, she appeared unimpeachably human. Indeed, had we, in another lifetime, caught sight of her across Sator Square while strolling companionably together, you might have even called her more than tolerably handsome.
Yet in this life, in this place, I recoiled. It was impossible, immoral. For though the creature before me had the bust of a woman—& not just any woman, but one of graceful bearing, with calm self-possession in her dark eyes—the promise of well-turned legs & the hint of an adorable ankle had been replaced by the monstrous hindquarters of an enormous horse.
She moved aside to let me in, navigating the space as easily as if she had been born a monster. It was in all ways a display of courtesy such as I had despaired of finding during my tenure at Janartash. If only—if only!—such treatment had not come at the hands of a mixling horse. Her hooves—I shudder even to recollect them beneath the feathery white fetlocks, the restrained power of her legs—the broad girth of her, the tail…—
The mixling woman looked down upon me, her hands resting against the place where, beneath her shirt, I imagined that skin & hide would join. How easily I might be trampled beneath her hooves. The thought made my breath catch. I felt light-headed; I was sure I would swoon.
“You may as well come in, marazjie,” said she, with a dry note that might have been satirical. “Or are you afraid I’ve got lion’s claws and viper’s fangs, to match?” She bared her teeth at me: human teeth, straight & very white. I wondered at her diet; many of the laborers eat very poorly, & their teeth suffer for it. Might diet not play a rôle in such a tidy assimilation of the chaotrope? I wondered, resolving to further exploration. Then I recalled myself, astride the threshold in gape-mouthed silence; I gave a very weak smile by way of answer and stepped inside.
(I will continue…-S.)
16 Arhu-tisritu, 368 YD, evening
But everywhere were signs of a distinctly human habitation. The walls were hung in places with colorful textiles. Had her own hands had the making of them? For the first time, I found myself curious: what had the lives of the mixlings of Janartash been, before their bodies were invaded & thereafter, changed?
She had waited, while I stared, for me to be the first to speak. I told her that I admired the decoration & inquired as to the manner of their making.
“Do I detect a Lummary hand in their design?” I asked.
She did not answer directly, but merely sounded out, with the absent patience of one correcting a small child at lessons: “Watta-ni. Not Lummary.”
I flushed, feeling myself obscurely chastised. Perhaps seeking to spare me, she turned the conversation to business, saying: “Where is the other one?”
I relayed to her, in simple terms, what had befallen poor Kurakand. Her mouth tightened as I spoke, pressing back words best left unsaid. I took from this that like myself, she was well-acquainted with my colleague’s true character; like myself, she marked his absence no real loss.
I asked then how much she already knew of Kurakand’s hopes for the project. To my surprise, she was able to speak fluently on the general mechanism & its intended effects. She was obviously lacking in formal education, and yet I found myself admiring her clear discernment. In only a few words, she was able to cut to the heart of things.
Had K. approached her, I asked, or had she elected herself as test subject?
“Zida, my—” (Here she used a Lummary word that I am given to understand has much of the force of our “husband,” though their bonds are less strongly held than ours, more easily dissolved by whim or caprice.) “—is eager for me to receive the treatment. He is sick of Janartash, & quarantine. He wishes to move freely about the world, as we once did. He hopes that I might, in time, be cured.”
She paused, letting me know with silence what she could not put to words: she knew, even if husband Zida did not, how unlikely this would be, how long the arc of philosophic inquiry. I thought I detected a note of sympathy for myself, in her silence; for my great discoveries to come, whose worth may not be appreciated until long after my time has come to its inevitable end.
“Still,” she finished, “I told him I would try. I am Ayanni, by the way. You have not yet given me your name.” Again, that note of censure.
I made my belated introductions. She inclined her head, a queen receiving tribute from a supplicant, an emissary of a foreign potentate.
I began to lay out my supplies for the procedure. Before I might begin, however, I determined—not trusting to K.’s notes—to complete a comprehensive physical inspection. How the light touch of Providence guided me! How nearly I failed to see!
Kurakand’s diagnostic gauntlets fit poorly over my fingers. After some effort, I was able to generate sufficient contact between instrument and skin to establish conductivity. Still, the rings slipped freely around my hands, so that betimes my fingers grazed or dimpled Ayanni’s skin with nothing to mediate the contact between our flesh. Her skin where I touched it was very warm, dry, and soft. My palms grew moist as I worked, as I have the habitus of sweating when deeply engaged in concentration. I felt that the damp touch of my fingers marked her in some way. I believe now, in writing about it, that what I was experiencing was a form of premonition. At the time, however, I almost wanted to apologize.
“You invoke your husband,” I said instead. “You do not find yourself weary of Janartash, as well?”
She laughed without mirth. “Who wouldn’t be weary of Janartash, marazjie?”
I must say, I agree.
She continued, “Zida & I differ on a rather more fundamental matter. Like you, he hates and fears the xiuaipa—” (I have rendered the word she used as nearly as I can. It was not familiar, but I believe from context that it may be a Lummary word for chaotrope or mixling.) “—& I do not.”
I was astonished. That one such as Ayanni might accept her transformation with any-thing like equanimity was nearly monstrous. I desired to seek a fuller understanding of her mind.
But I did not have the chance to discover if she would have welcomed my interrogation.
Housed within the too-large gauntlets, my hands had been gently probing Ayanni’s lower stomach, the feminine swell below the navel. Some small span below my touch, the boundary of transfiguration swirled, a movement at the edge between reality and un-, attracting the eye even as it repelled. Instinctively, I moved to caress it. She held herself completely still, as rigid as stone, beneath the exploration of my hands. She might have made a sound, like a half-broken gasp, but I did not stop & she did not speak.
In seeking the chaotropaic place, my hands detected a different, more familiar movement below the skin. I felt a yielding in her frozen flesh: relief, I believe, at having been found out.
“You are with child,” I accused.
For the first time since our meeting, her remote mask of self-possession slipped. She lowered her eyes to mine, & her face was full of fear. Her wide, silt-dark eyes were quite wet, limpid and pleading. She clutched my hands with her own. I felt, beneath my palms, the place where human & horse flesh combined.
“If others at the Sanction knew, they would have you below the knife,” I said, sternly. She would lose the infant somehow forming within her; she would never bear children again.
“Please, marazjie,” said she. “Don’t tell.”
She did not fall upon her knees & beg, but I believe she would have, had I been of a mind to make her do it. But I would not, for from the moment when my hand felt the flutter of another life beneath the chaotrope, an idea had begun to form. To monitor & guide the development of a chaotropaic child—the first chaotropaic child—in utero. Could any anatomist, in his wildest dreams, ever imagine such? Such discoveries occasioned by this opportunity would surely rate me first among equals within the society of experimental philosophers. This horse-woman, this Ayanni; she might get something of what she desired, too.
“Your child may well be born monstrous,” I warned her.
“But it will still be my child, even so,” came the retort.
“It may be born dead,” I continued, ruthless. (She must believe me a reluctant co-conspirator, acting against both moral rectitude and my own better judgment. She must believe we both had something equally great to lose. It was the only way to protect myself. Do not judge me harshly for it, dearest. To live in Janartash is to live at all times within a sea of lies & one must either learn to swim those waters or be drowned beneath them.)
“Then I will mourn it then, & not lay out the winding sheet before I have a corpse to lie down in it.”
I knew then that I had her. I retrieved the ice-blue medicament in its stoppered vials &, with a great and purposeful deliberation, poured it away. I took up instead the harmless sterile saline, intended only for bathing incision sites. Amidst the laborious process of filling the tubal rigging harness, I began to lay out my plan.
17 Arhu-tisritu, 368 YD, evening
My sweet friend—
No sooner had I reached the end of last night’s letter than I was suddenly overcome by the horror of discovery: that some jumped-up factotum might, in pursuit of personal glory, seek to plumb the depths of my own ambition by pawing through my correspondence. I shoved your letter deep within my slope in a fever, feeling watchful eyes surrounding me. I locked the case, & unlocked it again. Did I usually lock away my notes? If an observer uncovered my desk, tidy of its habitual researches, all my effects in their proper place—would they suspect? But then what if a domestic took it in her head to pry, hoping to barter new knowledge for some privilege? I felt myself trapped in an agony of indecision. Finally, I hid your letter away.
All today, I worried at the key, turning it over & over in my pocket. The brass is warmed to my touch, with some of the yielding quality of skin.
My fingers remembered the feel of Ayanni; yet much of the revulsion that gripped me in our first meeting had already faded from memory. I recalled only the soft nap of her skin, like velvet, with the faint pulse of another life beating beneath. I vowed that next we met, I would linger longer in my inspection along the monstrous ridge of her horse’s back, the bunched power of muscles beneath the hide, until the horror faded from those places, too.
I knew, also, that I could not endanger our experiment by entrusting its nascent stirrings to a stranger’s hands; not even for you. You will have cause to forgive me yet again, dearest, for the letter which was already so behindhand will be delayed until the project has come to parturition. I long for the day when all is clear between us once again.
When you at last grasp this sheaf of letters and within it, the full shape of my triumph, in that moment I will be as much or more as ever I was, your own,
S.
5 Arhu-tebetu, 368 YD
O best & truest companion along my path to glory—
It has been long—again, too long!—since I have written. (Tho’ of course you shall perceive the space between these missives as no time at all, shall know the passage of my days only as individual leaves in a fat sheaf, many months in the writing!) I know you will be understanding: my thoughts have been much preoccupied of late. In the month since poor Kurakand came to his final grief (I will not bore you with the details of his fatal accident. By the time you receive this, the story will have already reached the Institute), my time is both less and more my own. I have free reign over the laboratory now, and may direct my work as I choose. You know well in what direction that trends.
The gestation continues well; it goes quickly, and though Ayanni complains of some discomfort, she is otherwise in robust good health. The wealth of data I have gathered staggers me. I have hardly had time to put my collection into any-thing like a good order. I assuage my guilt by assuring myself that I will have time in plenty—after.
I have begun laying in the necessary supplies for parturition, when the time comes. The supplies—implements of dissection & chirurgie, repurposed to obstetrics, equipment in case the neonate must needs be sustained through artificial means, as well as more mundane supplies of food & water, warm clothing—I have been assembling piecemeal, so no too-large bolus is seen to go missing at once. It was Ayanni’s own idea that I should do so; her idea, as well, that I shuffle around the documentation of her work assignments, so that one workteam might think that she is here, another there, & none realize that she is in truth neither here nor there, but squirreled away in our little shack, where I might minister to her tenderly in her confinement. Of course it essential that there is no witness to the swelling of her belly, that no-one should impede our plan until she is wholly delivered of her child, & that child is remanded safe into my—the Sanction’s—observation & care.
She is clever to have thought of it. Hers is a fine mind, only limited by the accident of her birth & lack of opportunities for improvement. After our child is born & my breakthroughs finally recognized, I intend to undertake a course of tutelage for Ayanni, & perhaps look to training her up as my assistant. Just think, my dear, how much more vital, how much more penetrating the philosophical questions we might ask, when the subject wields the tools of inquiry against her own body!
All in all, we are very cozy here, within our small space of discovery. I do worry about the effects of this long & dour seclusion on Ayanni’s spirits, however. Now that the year is moving towards spring, the smell of new grasses & spring flowers—even here—drifts on the breeze; the sun & daughters cast their light bountifully over the marsh. The light on the water casts up sparkling motes that reflect off the burnished metal cladding of the Pragmatic Sanction & make their way even through the shutters of our rude hut. When last I made my visit, Ayanni asked me to tell her of the changing seasons, & spoke longingly of years past, when she had been in the habit of wandering the marshes, gathering a root used to make a cake counted as a delicacy within Lummary cooking.
“I would make it for you!” she exclaimed. But her next utterance quite extinguished the winning sparkle that played across her features: “Only Zida cannot find where it grows, no matter how I direct him.” This was accompanied by a dark look towards the man in question, lurking miserably, half in shadow. He resents my presence here, as I resent his; perhaps the more on his part, as he must surely recognize my greater claim to Ayanni’s attention.
“Perhaps if you told me, I could undertake the mission for you,” I offered, lightly.
She laughed. “If Zida cannot find it, marazjie, having walked these marshes all his life, I am far from easy in my mind that you should fare any better.”
By the openness of her expression, she shewed her jest. She has melting-dark eyes with thick brows drawn curiously straight across them, so that she must arrange her face with care if she does not wish to seem severe. We have established an easy rapport between us, these weeks. Though we have not the understanding born of many years familiarity nor that of shared circumstance in breeding or education—the roots with which our own fellow-feeling has been deeply watered, yours & mine, these many years—I believe nevertheless that she understands something of my heart; & I of hers.
Zida watched our merriment with deepening scowl, until at last he stalked from the house like a bad omen, letting the door to rattle in its poor frame behind him. Ayanni’s followed his exit with her eyes, though she did not move to stop it. Indeed, I believe she was not unpleased to see him go.
After some small cajoling on my part, she was at last convinced to divulge the site. It is not so very far from her cottage; an easy distance, were it not for the fence. It is, I have discovered, a very small matter to disrupt the current to a section of enclosure, & thereafter to loose some small pieces of the chain. In this way, a door is created, easily moved aside to create a space through which a man—or a mixling, who might be some span greater in both height & breadth than even the largest man—might pass undetected & with ease. How grateful Ayanni will be, when I reveal it to her! If it would not arouse suspicion from my colleagues, who already buzz about & quiz me on my “secret project” like sucking-flies, I would hasten back to the workers’ quarters at once, to tell Ayanni of my triumph.
But that sweet satisfaction must be delayed. I shall instead gain the same comfort from telling you as I might her, knowing that when at last you read this you shall be moved with happiness for your friend,
S.
28 Arhu-addaru, evil day, 368 YD
I have taken up my pen in the small dark hours. The silvery-pink shimmer that pulses from the borehole like flames, nearly invisible in strong daylight, bounces off the cloud that gathers low across the breadth of the Inclusion zone.
I am troubled by dreams.
In my sleep I found myself walking the marshes. The gummy grey mud that forever sucks at our foundations gathered thick around my knees. As I trudged through it, I felt that sludge as both obstacle and goad. I did not know what I was looking for, only that I could not rest, could not stop, until it was found; only that, if I did not find it, I was like to die.
Over time, my progress grew easier, my steps more assured. The silt slipped around me, viscous & warm, very like the fluid of the sacque amniote. The tawdry familiarity of bulrush & marshgrasses, which had assaulted my person with sharp burrs & sawing blades, began similarly to change, becoming tissue-thin tendrils, drifting in shocking indigo & scarlet & violet shades. Like tongues they licked enticingly at my limbs; like fingers they encircled my neck. The wind moved through these tender shoots whispering blandishments, the caressing accents of an unfamiliar tongue. I was exhorted to come farther, faster, to rush to my beloved’s side; I knew in that place beyond knowing that they were leading me ever closer to the very center of the Inclusion Zone, to Pashulla itself, whereupon my beloved would greet me & at last take me into her arms. Now I walked, now swam forward through the marshy waters, which grew ever deeper at my passage. I chanced to look down upon my body, moving as smoothly through the ice-blue fluids as any organic animacule of our lakes & rivers, & saw that I had begun to change. It was as if I were being washed clean, my human form worn away like the rough edges of a river stone. But I could not see what form, my true from, lay beneath my rotting, human skin. I woke bathed in my own cooling sweat. My face was damp; I believe that, unconscious, I must have wept.
I do not know what it could mean.
1 Arhu-aru, 369 YD
Something has happened. I will tell it to you now. You who have always forgiven me every thing; ’tis all I can hope that she, who understands my heart, will do the same, when all is laid bare.
Zida is dead. I did not wish it, before it happened. There was nothing I could do.
You, ever-discerning, have surely gathered that I am not wholly distraught. Indeed, I will say it plain: I did not like the man. I cannot account his as any true loss.
The man did combine the worst of both the Lummary & Eshtur into a mind both odious & repellant in its smallness. There existed in him a robust horror of the chaotropaic moment. Well I marked the narrowly shuttered revulsion with which he beheld my dealings with Ayanni, his clear hatred as I examined the mesmeric shifting of her skin, or drew searching hands along her underparts from the heartgirth to the living dock of her tail, feeling even through the gauntlets the narrowly restrained passion & ferocity of her horse parts.
I do not believe that he ever truly understood the full scope of my project, or else he should never have tolerated my presence. Any misapprehension on his part only made my situation more tolerable. Nor did I ask Ayanni how she spoke of me, of our work, when they were alone. In truth, the idea of their private congress turns my stomach.
But I rather think that Zida would have believed that Ayanni still wished to be cured even if she had smashed her phials of medicament on the ground before him. He did not see because he did not wish to see.
Which is not to say that he saw nothing. His fear of Ayanni & his disdain for me grew, clouding his sight. He might have contrived that Ayanni & I had conspired in secret to mount some sort of plot against him & his natural rights of patriarchy. Once he had conceived of this malfeasance, the idea twisted in his mind, overcoming all habits of rational thought until he at last felt himself goaded into action by the daimon of his own creation.
I was out upon the eighth-storey wind-walk when he found me; smoking cheroot & looking out over the flat estuary to the horizon where the shocking colors of the Inclusion Zone lingered, half-visible—or may be, knowing that the Inclusion lay beyond, I only believed that I saw the evidence of its pale fires against the sky.
My mind was entirely occupied in mulling over the peculiar dreams which have afflicted my person, of late; I did not hear him approach.
Of late my nights have churned with chaotropaic energies. In my sleep, I am drawn ever forward to the Inclusion and the borehole that plunges through the mantle of the world & into the chaos that roils perpetually beneath.
In my waking hours, I cannot put stock overmuch in the interpretation of dreams; it is a folk science, nothing more. Yet I cannot help but notice: in all my first season at Janartash, not one of these phantasms stalked my nights. It was only after my project changed—after my meeting with Ayanni—that my unconscious thoughts became so disturbed. In fear, I ran the tests; I searched my own blood. I am sure that I remain fully human. Though I have come to appreciate the powerful applications of the chaotropaic change, though I no longer look upon the mixlings with the unbridled horror with which I once beheld their tormented physiognomies, I cannot account a similar change within myself as anything but an abomination & a loss.
In daylight, I am rational: I tell myself that the dreams are nothing; they are natural; they are the mind assorting an excess of novel discovery into usable form. In this way, I try to soothe my pounding heart, even as my body fights against sleep.
In my dreams, I change & change again.
I have once again grown discursive; my memory recoils from what I have endured.
He put his hands upon me. I do not know what he meant by it; I was certain that he meant me violence. He was a terribly large man, a lumpen mass of muscle webbed with sinew. As you know, I have never been strong. I truly believed, in that moment, that I was looking into the face of my own death. Flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his lips, like foam on the mouth of a mad dog. He opened his mouth, but if he spoke I could not make sense of it; I saw only the gaping hole of his mouth, ringed with teeth to tear. I was paralyzed, limp with fear. I could only imagine the abuse that Zida would rain down upon me, the blows of his fist & the lashing of his tongue, the excoriating accusations.
I imagined that he had discovered our deception, Ayanni’s & mine. Perhaps after long months, he had at last seen the truth of his wife, had seen beneath her skin & knew that no properly human infant had ever twisted through such monstrous shapes. We do not yet know what form our experimental child will take, Ayanni & I, but I know even now—he cannot help but be remarkable, some-thing entirely other. Whatever forms the child may take, he will never be Zida’s son.
Perhaps he intended to repudiate my superior claim on the child. Perhaps he intended to accuse me of dealing falsely with him. Had I capitulated with ease, granting him the power too long denied to him, that he believed was his right, maybe that would have been the end of it. I would have returned to my lowly position at the laboratory bench, having labored for many months in the service of nothing at all. Without my care, Ayanni would surely die in the maternal bed; the child, too. I doubt that even in holding the pale, hemorrhaging body of his dead wife, & the cold, monstrous corpse of his cold, monstrous child, would he be able to understand that he—& only he—had laid the bricks on the road to his own destruction.
He believed himself ever one of Providence’s victims; no-thing could ever be his fault.
I detected an evil, subterranean gleam to his eye; a vindictive cruelty that would not be satisfied until he had extracted fulsome revenge. He could not simply warn me away & walk away into a miserable future of his own devising. He would not be stopped until he had destroyed me utterly. He would have exposed my dealings to the Sanction, scuttling my research & soiling my good name. I would be ruined: in Janartash, yes, but can you assure me that the doors of the Institute would remain open to me, if my undoing should come to pass? If I were to return to you, a wreckage on the shores of my own ambition, would you open your arms & your door to me, as you have always promised? I wish nothing more than to believe it of you, my stalwart. But in that moment, even the safety of your harbor fled my mind.
All of this I discerned in a blink of pure terror. I saw his face as he walked toward me & I knew, instantly, his heart. I understood the scope of his plans.
I could not allow him to effect my destruction. But, my friend, I swear to you: I did not mean to hurt him. How could I? I have already said that he was larger, more powerful than me by far. Too, he was moved by rage & passion, where I could act only from a place of reason, & of fear. I recall only a blur of movement, a brief struggle & then—
One moment, he was approaching. In the next, he was falling, & then he was felled. I saw him, lying by the base of the Sanction’s tower, his neck & limbs arranged at an angle most unnatural. It seemed unreal, a tableau arranged by some world distant from our own.
I thought: at least it is over. But then, from far below, he stirred. Immediately a terror rose within me that he might moan or call out or otherwise alert my erstwhile colleagues to his presence & raise suspicion in their mind, which I would then be called upon to answer. Already they apprise me askance for my proximity to poor Kurakand, ere he came to grief—which I could not help, any more than that my presence drove Zida to harm himself in some fit of temper!—& I fear that any defense I could mount would not, for reasons beyond my mortal control, receive fair hearing.
I fair flew down the stairs. Zida could not have fallen faster than I ran. When I achieved his prone form I knelt—muddying to ruin the knees of my trousers in the process, I might add—& found my observations confirmed. Zida yet lived, though his breath was faint & ragged, the spittle that choked his lips now tinged with pinkish sputum. There was an unmistakable odor about him; as you know, it is not uncommon for the bowels to void themselves in the moment of trauma. I suppose I ought to have pitied him. But if I could not do that—at least I might offer him what mercy we are trained to, the quickening of death. It would have been an unacceptable risk, to run back to the laboratory & retrieve the accoutrements of the painless injection. I could not leave him alone for even the length of a quick errand; & only suppose if I had been detained or waylaid by some agent who had decided that today, of all days, was a time for conversation!
No slipping into sleep for Zida; still, the rock fit easily into my hand. It was heavy. It could not have been more than five or six blows before his breath stopped for-ever. It took all my strength, to do it thoroughly; I could not do it tidily, also. The mess made it difficult to take a pulse. Having satisfied myself that his suffering had ended, I set about making certain that the scene could not indict me. The current that carries effluvia from the Sanction’s drains is swift; his body would sink below the rich silt of the marshes. The Lummary practice brackish burial, I reflected, as at last his head disappeared; & perhaps it would bring Ayanni comfort to know that he had been treated thus respectfully at the last.
No sooner had this thought arisen than I was overcome with shame: my thoughts, churned by panic, had been entirely upon my own troubles, sparing nary a thought for the troubles that Zida’s rashness would lay at Ayanni’s door. Though my observer’s role in his unfortunate end was easily obscured, I was far from easy in my mind that Ayanni would escape a similar scrutiny. Better, by far, that we two—nay, we three—make our own way, beyond the stifling borders of Janartash.
This notion, once conceived, proved irresistibly attractive to me. What discoveries I might make, through continued close congress with Ayanni, watching & indeed molding the growth of her child, observing the continued development of the chaotrope of her own flesh. I had gathered through our conversations that Ayanni longed, in secret, to retreat within the Inclusion Zone, to the village of her childhood, evacuated during the initial cataclysm & abandoned since but for a stalwart few, chaotropes unrecognizable to human eyes. But what a boon for experimental philosophy, these monstrous subjects, these children of nightmares! I had continued to refine Kurakand’s recipe for the medicament; I was entirely convinced that a regular regimen of infusions would stave off any change to my self. We might live together very happily within that roiling clime. Perhaps in time Ayanni might come to bear more children, & I might discover the effects of the Inclusion on a live gestation & birth. Once my understanding of the mechanism had been perfected, I would transform Ayanni & her children into beings of such strange perfection as have never heretofore been seen.
So pleased was I by the direction my experiments were taking, I almost missed the revelation of my own mind. Who would father these children, now that Zida was dead? Perhaps you have guessed; you have always known me better than myself.
The revelation hit me with all the force of a fall: I am in love with Ayanni. Perhaps you have known it all along. Perhaps it breaks your heart.
I will go to her now, & confess all. I fear that Zida’s death may hit her hard; however odious his person, however lightly the Lummary hold the marital bond, their lives were a great deal entwined. Nonetheless, she is a rational creature, & will surely be convinced that we have no other recourse than to flee, & that together. Moreover, I believe, in time, she will forgive me.
I can only hope that you will do the same. For this is, at least for the moment, farewell. I hope to post this letter once we are some ways distant from Janartash, & I shall not write again until I can do so in safety & in triumph. Do not mourn me, my friend, my oldest & first of loves, for I will be happy,
S.
Ayanni—
I write in haste. I arrived to a home stripped bare, and you nowhere to be found. I do not know what sudden fear of discovery has occasioned your need to flee, but I know where you have gone; I am coming.
When I reach you, know that I will explain all; if I have mistaken your intent & you come upon this package of letters first, read them and know the fullness of my heart. Understand that what I have done, I did only for you.
I will head from Janartash, and walk the path that has heretofore appeared to me only in dreams. When I come at last to Pashulla, the home that was once beloved to you, know that I will wait there. Turn your eyes towards the fire of shifting lights, the chaotropaic place, the hole in the heart of the world.
Come and find me,
Sastu
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Anneke Schwob is a graduate of Clarion Writers Workshop whose short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Baffling, and elsewhere. Find more at annekeschwob.info. | |