Work Text:
Written by Kouklan Maunner
Published in the Mesei Ti on the 1715th month of the Ephemeral Moment
Digital transcription facilitated by the Public Universal Library Foundation on the 1493rd month of the Stellar Moment
Uploaded to the tangle by Raevie Nille, SM-4198-03-5.5
SECTION 1 — TRAIN RIDE
The author of this work sat with Harsech Vandertelt on the decaying cemetery bench, watching caddisflies dance across the surface of the drownpool where the Vandertelt pair had been interred one thousand, three hundred, and eighty-two months ago.
"I'm dead." Harsech said.
"Not if I have anything to say about it," said the author, "I've got one last job for you, and I'm gonna get my money's worth." He reached inside his trenchcoat and produced a large yellow envelope, packed with documents and photos. He handed it to Harsech, who took it listlessly.
"Why only me?" The old investigator murmured, staring into the pond where his body had surely already decayed into oblivion. "Is this punishment for dying before Wellsen? For leaving him alone without me? I didn't want to die. I promise. I didn't want to leave him..."
The author, distracted by the fiddly buttons of his coat, coughed dismissively. "No, none of that nonsense. Get a hold of yourself! It's just that I'm in a bit of trouble with money, publisher says that if write something good and historical I'll get a nice payout—Ugck," He spat out another wet cough, "The reason it's just you and me is 'cause I only have spare change for two train tickets."
Harsech had already opened the envelope, which despite its previous description really only contained a single postcard. The author reached over and stabbed his fat finger clumsily into its center.
"The Sephied Synctown," the author said of the tall dark tower in the photograph, "the most haunted place in the world. It's been abandoned for almost a lifetime. People say it was built in a bad spot, that the observation tower obstructs the wind currents that spirits use to exit the world. Say that all sorts of ghosts are trapped there, unable to escape..."
"There is no point," said the dead investigator, "ghosts aren't real. I can tell you that right now."
"Then you wouldn't object to having a look around, now would you?" The author rose to his feet, "now come, our train departs in just five sentences."
"If it's all the same, I'd rather be dead again," Harsech said.
"Huh? I didn't quite catch that—wait, shit, we're almost out of time, this is already sentence three! Quick, we'd better move!"
The author grabbed the investigator by the hand and lead him through a dizzying obstacle course of intriguing places and humorous circumstances (flying by far too quickly to be described in adequate detail) until they arrived on the train platform and, through the copious employment of sentence joiners, the two had just enough time to athletically leap aboard the moving train in that split second before the arrival of this sentence's final word. They clambered up the steps of the otherwise vacant passenger car and found their seats. Nobody had bothered to check that they'd paid for tickets. Money is a fiction, anyway.
"Why did you have to come along?" Harsech complained, "why couldn't it have been Wellsen and I? You could've stayed home."
The author bristled, "How could I be sure you got on the right train? And besides, I need the time to get to know you better, so I can properly write your character, see? Otherwise, your fanclub would go after me for such an inaccurate portrayal. They'd cook me alive! So, tell me about yourself. I'll use my magic author powers to distill your essence into words and phrases."
And so the two spent the long train ride to the end of the world reviewing the Vandertelt ghost's life. His birth, childhood, hundredhood, young adulthood, early adulthood, mid-adulthood, late adulthood, thousandaires, and deathbed. By the time Ornament disappeared below the horizon the author had written pages upon pages of notes, comprehensively documenting Harsech's history, personality, relationships, accomplishments, failures, spirituality, habits, preferences, first love, first loss, first memories, suppressed memories, banking records, credit records, birthmarks, scars, chronic illnesses, and maybe even a psychosexual fixation or two. It was enough to write twenty biographies. But who reads biographies anymore? Those don't pay the bills. The people want metafictional romps and creative liberties, and that's what they're going to get. The author closed up his notepad and tossed it out the moving train's window.
"Why would you do that?" Harsech watched the notepad tumble and shred as it collided with the ground, "all those shifts wasted..."
"Don't worry," the author smirked, tapping his skull, "it's all up here. And hey, take a look at yourself! Our little interview already helped. You're fuller in the cheeks and snout. Your eyes are brighter. You're less dead than when we started. And anyway, it's better to write without dismal things like 'historical facts' getting in the way. Facts are murder for the artistic process, you must know. Nobody became a great writer by memorizing dates. Hey, we're almost there."
The grand grey tower of the Sephied Synctown loomed on the horizon. Its form drew a rectangular silhouette against the emerging stars, growing larger and larger as the train approached.
They pulled into the station. The two put on heavier coats to brave the frigid climate. Harsech stood at the door of the train car as it lurched to a halt, then stepped off into the cold dark air.
The investigator turned around, "are you coming?"
The author was at this moment struck with a sudden attack of cowardice and couldn't bring himself to step onto the platform. The train departed again, leaving Harsech behind to do the investigation alone. For this unfortunate circumstance, which the author can only apologize for, what comes next must therefore be pure speculation.
SECTION 2 — COLD WALK
The synctown had become, in its abandonment, a kind of quiet instrument. Gusts pumped around its dark corners, whistling softly like a busker's bellodeon, whipping up clouds of snow and ice that battered against Harsech's face. He pulled a soft black snout-warmer from the coat and put it on.
Harsech had died before the era of synctowns, but the author explained it well enough. Train schedules need good clocks. Normal clocks are imprecise. Stars are precise in their movements, enough to be used as a clock. But stars are only seen in dark, cold, unlivable places. And so, naturally, towns are established here, with precisely enough engineering to make them livable.
And what a large town it had been. Based on the number of buildings, Harsech estimated it must have been populated by at least a thousand. But those times were long over. The town was dead.
As he trudged through the unplowed streets, unlit by electric light, he looked to the open sky. The living Harsech had only seen stars once. The Vandertelt pair had participated in an expedition to the dark side in their early career. They didn't quite make it. They'd been unprepared. But they'd gotten far enough to see a glimpse. A smattering of the brightest stars, peeking through the glow of the atmosphere.
That paled in comparison to this. There were more stars in these skies than he could ever have imagined, hundreds of little lights nestled among the hazy iridescent curtains of space. He shut his electric torch for a few minutes to fully bask in the wonder of the spotted black sky.
But it was 15 marks below freezing. He couldn't stay in the cold dark forever. And besides, there was the job he was hired to do. Now, where in this dead place could one find a ghost? Recall the story from earlier! The observation tower is obstructing the "natural flow of spirits!" That's the place. Harsech hurried along toward its shadow.
SECTION 3 — PARTY TIME
Getting into the tower was a simple matter of inserting a section break into the narrative. Harsech removed his snout-warmer and patted the snow and ice off his hair and horns. He stomped his feet to knock the snow off his boots. It was warm inside. Artificially warm, despite its unpowered darkness. He pointed his torch down the long hallway past the vestibule, and listened.
If the synctown was now an instrument, this tower was the strings. It hummed and groaned with the sound of wind bearing against its walls. Harsech imagined being inside the bass chordo of a lounge band, its notes so low you can’t quite tell if they’re off-tune.
The hallway itself was strewn with celebratory flowers and laurels in its rafters. Hanging pickellas and lerédeens, their cyan-with-merette catching the torchlight just beautifully. They brought to his attention an old story. Harsech, like any dead man, was full of old stories.
There was a girl that the Vandertelts had mentored in the art of the Process. She was a bright one, and even though the pair had become dull in their thousandaires she still benefited from the tutelage. The first research task Harsech gave her seemed simple enough: “how is it that the pigment that makes a flower’s merette can’t ever be harvested?” Whenever one threw a handful of petals into the mortar, the colour died the moment they met the pestle. Now, what this impressively intelligent girl was able to do… Hm, what was her name…?
A swell battered the windows and he startled. He swung his lamplight toward the noise. The glare caught the panes as they clattered against their frames like intoxicated partiers toasting their glasses. They cheered for his arrival, in the echo of his footfalls, as he hiked up the steps of the central stairwell. Their laughter flashed in glimpses, whistles of surreptitious gusts hunting their way through the tower’s labyrinth of ducts.
But where was he with that story… Oh, right. She worked at the problem for several months. Whereas most might’ve thought she was making no progress, Harsech could see she was snipping away large swaths of possibility. Eventually she found an answer. A flower’s merette was not a pigment at all. It was micro-structure on the petal’s surface, trapping light in its spectral maze which only the pretty vivid merette knew how to escape. It was a consequence of light’s ability to interfere with itself. Sadly Harsech wasn’t around for that final revelation. She found that out after he had died.
It wasn’t just the central hallway that had been decked with the flowers. They were everywhere. Harsech didn’t know what to make of them. How could they have gotten here? He figured they must’ve been placed by the synctown’s final employees just before their exit. A going-away party? There were customs for flower decorations. The black-with-grey barbets and houvadines could be found at funerals. The red-with-black anires and ruetentias were arranged in delicate rows at anniversaries. But pickellas and lerédeens… What could that mean? Harsech knew of many customs, but not this one.
The higher he climbed the louder it became. The wind was now the cacophony of an uproarious crowd, scores of disparate conversations all vying for attention. At this height the tower swayed with the wind, the anatomical parts of the building unsettling and re-settling in its rhythm. Breathing like an old man. It was a vivid wonder the tower was still standing after so long. It was unfashionable to linger on the boundary between leaving and staying, after all.
Panels and support beams clicked and popped like the cutlery against their ceramic plates. As Harsech explored the corridors he saw that it was all the same dull repetition of blasé topics. He was lost. The stairwell exit eluded him, and he was unable to raise a server for a drink. He told himself not to panic. He picked a wall and followed it.
But it all seemed to go on forever. No direction was viable to escape the labyrinth. Every option just brought him right back to the same places. The same pickellas and lerédeens, the cheering gales and clinking glasses and hors d'oeuvres and the hunt for a conversation that wasn’t inane. He stalked about the party, in want of someone interesting to speak with. There probably was no such person—just like the ghosts of the Sephied Synctown. That investigation was doomed from the get-go. Why had he ever agreed to such a thing? Such a silly waste of time.
He wandered by the six-piece lounge band, the one with the bass chordo that might-not-be-in-tune. He stopped to listen to their song. It was an old classic from the Contemporary Moment, and not a very good one. A tray of appetizers rolled by and he snagged a square cracker with a dollop of dace tartar. Food was delicious, at least.
It had been parties like these where he and Wellsen had secured funding for their adventures. Much can be gained by rubbing shoulders with the curious elite, by beguiling them with the tales of your exploits. He scanned the gala hall for a mark. It was hard to read this crowd. It was a rather garish theme party. Everyone was dressed up in all sorts of historical costumes. But just his luck, across the room, sat a younger fellow whose posture seemed promising. He wore an ornate purple chiton in the axial style, hand against muzzle in boredom. Harsech would tell him a story.
SECTION 4 — RIVER CRUISE
The man in the purple chiton, who simply called himself Tive, arrived on the scene of the story with nothing more than a glass of presso and a detached look. He and Harsech found themselves sitting opposite one another on the rickety xylapane that the Vandertelt pair had navigated through the Seelere swamp in search of the mythical freshwater chimaera back in the secade of 5020 CM. It was a most exciting story from a more adventurous time.
They were travelling up-the-mound, the light of Ornament neatly parallel with the vanishing point of the dark river. Harsech was pedaling for the two of them, working up a sweat. It was rude to make your listener work for their story. That’s the job of the storyteller, and any writer who shirks this duty is betraying their dire incompetence.
Tive had been rather skeptical about this “story” business. He was very very bored and, should he be exposed to even a single extra drop of boredom, he was sure to fall off the precipice and be lost forever to the infinite sinkhole of apathy. Harsech graciously assured him of the story’s excitement. It was from a more adventurous time, after all.
Harsech painted the scene in practised detail. He deftly used words like “dark” and “harrowing” and “anxious” to imbue the river with a sinister undertone. He spoke with a hushed voice, gesticulated conspiratorially, and carried on about the gnarled, shattered branches that dotted the landscape. He drew upon a prudent library of similes, comparing the fallen trees to “groping fingers” and “a leering audience.” One must always be judicious with similes, and any storyteller who isn’t is flirting with laziness.
But they were still missing a character. There was that local boy that the Vandertelts had hired to guide them up the swamp. Harsech produced a string puppet to act in his stead.
“The last sighting of the chimaera was by this floating log!” Said the puppet in its thin puppet voice. One must always have minor supporting characters, and any author who doesn’t clearly harbours an obsessive psyche and should best be avoided.
The puppet wiggled excitedly and Tive cupped his hands around his snout in second-hand embarrassment. “Can’t you put that thing away?”
“No,” said Harsech, “it’s important for the story.”
“Well at least let me work it, I’ll give it a better voice.”
Harsech pulled the puppet closer to himself protectively. “That won’t do, I’m the one telling the story.”
“Why not give up a little bit of authorial control? It’s boring to keep it all to yourself.”
Something knocked hard against the raft, rocking it dangerously to one side. Tive’s glass of presso emptied itself completely onto his outfit. “It’s the chimaera!” Yelled the puppet. On cue the six-piece lounge band began playing a dramatic underscore.
“It’s so obviously just that floating log hitting us.” Tive bemoaned as a server refilled his glass.
Harsech pedaled faster to escape, just as the story demanded. He panted fitfully as he pumped his legs. “Ah—Huff, huff, huff—Yes, it was the driftwood. Gave us quite the fright. So you’ve heard this one before?”
“History says you retold it over and over again on your deathbed as senility took you.” He mocked, “a most exciting story from a more adventurous time.” He slouched and pressed his muzzle into his hand again. Falling, down down down the sinkhole of apathy…
The thing in the water slammed into them again. That was new, it was only supposed to hit them once. Harsech turned around, and saw that the esteemed log was bobbing gleefully quite a distance downstream. Confused, he leaned overboard to look into the murky waters. The light of Ornament, dappled by the waves, revealed something swimming below the surface. He could see the archipelago of spinal ridges across its pale back, its twin columnar flippers beating the water into a wake. It was undeniable. A chimaera!
“Hey-go-mad!” Harsech cried, “That’s not in the script!”
Tive’s interest stirred from its slumber. “Oh? What is it?”
Harsech mouth was agape. His skin, normally a healthy taupe, tinted toward a sickly grey. He was speechless. “It’s the chimaera!” The puppet yelled for him, “It’s the chimaera!”
“Ah, finally something good.” Tive stretched against his chair, inhaled freshly, and flicked a blithe smile. He was saved. “See? Isn’t it great to give up a little bit of control?”
They made a great game of trying to outrun the creature. They swerved this-way and that, but eventually the chimaera caught up. It carefully aimed and rammed them at full speed. The collision clobbered the xylapane to pieces and Harsech and Tive and the puppet were launched unceremoniously into the cold of the Seelere. The music stumbled to a stop as they plunged. Harsech’s instincts took over. His arms and legs thrashed until he righted himself. His gills impelled the muddy freshwater. The pure water burned as it entered, but the dead man would survive.
SECTION 5 — LIGHT SHOW
It is always in the darkest places where the true nature of light is revealed.
Under the water the light of Ornament traipsed in ribbons. Two splashes radiated across the surface. Two expanding circles some distance apart. Tive had entered through one, Harsech and the puppet the other. Their peaks and troughs met in the middle and combined in peculiar and intricate ways. A dazzling spectacle of flickering shapes.
In spite of the chaos, there were still areas of stillness. One could draw particular arcs, running perpendicular to the line between the sources, and find that the water didn’t budge a single micro-rod along it. This was destructive interference. As the monadists would say, the preferences of the waves disagreed there, and so nothing moved.
The twin pinhole experiment had shown the same behaviour in light. In her darkroom, the Vandertelt’s forgotten protégé placed a number of flash-wicks within a box. These were timed charges. Once lit they would smolder for a few moments, enough time to seal them inside, then flare a brilliantly bright monochromatic hue. Even though the flare would easily blind, the walls of the box kept the light contained. She wore safety goggles nonetheless.
Of course, the fact that light is stopped by a solid object was not a scientific breakthrough. This was merely the “zero-case” of her experiment. The test to make sure her base assumptions were being met. She had proven that the box was indeed lightproof. She could continue.
Inset on one side of the box was a replaceable section, about the size of her hand. She removed it and smoke from the spent flash-wicks wafted out of the hole. In her other hand was a replacement, this one with a circular port framing a thin film of metal. And on this film was an astronomically tiny pinprick that she had made with a specially designed needle. It was a finicky operation that took several hundred attempts to get perfectly right. She threw in some new wicks, lit them, slotted in the replacement, and waited.
Now when the flares went off they cast a dim circular beam against the opposite wall. The rays that escaped were those that were lucky enough to be aimed for that tiny hole. And with a hole so tiny, those rays had to be quite lucky. She had to take her goggles off to even see it. Another not-so-interesting result, but this was merely the “first-case.” She would continue.
She replaced the inset again with a third version. This one had two pinpricks, as close as she was able to manage, one above the other. This one took almost five hundred attempts to get right. Not only did she need to make both holes correctly, she had to make sure not to disrupt the first in the process of making the second. Even a watchmaker would’ve struggled with the task.
This time, with the flares now funnelled through two separated pinholes, the image on the opposite wall became…
Well, what do you think will happen? Harsech and Wellsen’s “Process” asks us to make guesses. “Allow yourself the dignity to be surprised,” Wellsen would say. And besides, it’s a virtue to invite your readers to partake in the creative spirit. Let them, too, enjoy the misery of writing.
And below, so graciously provided to you, is the following empty area within which you may write your predictions. What’s going to happen next?
Wrong. Not even close. Watch this.
Under the water, where the light of Ornament traipsed in ribbons, Harsech looked up at the pair of expanding wavefronts that rippled across the water’s surface. Perpendicular to the line between their sources ran arcs of stillness. Places where the waves disagreed. His eyes followed one such arc, toward the horizon, into the dark. In so doing he saw the chimaera emerge from the silty water, heading straight toward him.
Unlike her aggression against the xylapane, the chimaera approached him with a mellow curiosity. This was her realm, and she knew it. She came within an arm’s breadth, and this is when Harsech recognized her. He recognized her eyes, their merette-with-cyan rich in fascination. He recognized her glittering pearlescent hair that flowed like seagrass in her wake. It was his protégé, reduced to this cadaverous chimaeric form. She swam in a spiral around him, observing him from all sides.
Seeing her in this form was disturbing enough, but even more so was the fact that he still couldn’t remember her name. Not that he could even speak it at this moment, vocal language was an invention of the air. Nonetheless, it made no sense that he’d forgotten. He remembered everything else of his life, why not this?
The forgotten woman drifted closer, reaching an arm out toward him. He didn’t flinch. Harsech was too bewildered to be afraid. She wrapped her webbed hand around the shoulder of the unnamed puppet, and gently dislodged it from his grasp.
This is not yours to play with, her serene face seemed to say.
And so she took the toy, cradling it against her chest with one arm. In so doing the puppet became the real child it had been contrived to represent. The boy clung to the woman’s side and eyed Harsech darkly. The chimaera kicked off gracefully, carrying her child away, and disappeared into the black murk.
Harsech was alone once again in the cold dark quiet.
Well, not quite. Tive tapped him on the shoulder, and gestured to the surface. They returned to the world of air, swam to the shore of the river, crawled through the muck of the swamp’s denouement, passed over the story’s final sentences, and only then did they arrive back at the party where they began. They lingered by the walls, dripping wet. A porter brought towels for their clothes and ointment for their irritated gills.
“Quite a lot of subtext in that one,” Tive commented, “are all your stories like that?”
It was here that Harsech finally got a proper look at the other man. Tive’s skin was a gentle blue as pale as the meridian sky. His horns were a ruddy black with a distinctive kink in the left. The shallow of his eyes were darker, the irises a placid grey-with-brown. And his arms, thin and rail-like, were tattooed with brown lines that betrayed the nerves and veins underneath. It was an old liternidic custom, a forget-me-not for all the inner workings of the flesh.
And most importantly, in the chaos of the story, his chiton had unfastened itself, its left sleeve falling to one side. Harsech could see now the reddish dotted arc that dove deep from his shoulder to his chest. This was no tattoo. It was the bite of the axial lovers.
Harsech pointed accusatorily at the scar in sudden realization. Tive il Nolke tilted his head to look at himself. “Oh,” he said torpidly, pulling the sleeve back into place, “I was wondering when that was going to happen.”
SECTION 6 — ESCAPE SEQUENCE
“So you’re supposed to be Tive Il Nolke, the male axial lover.” Said Harsech as they settled into plush chairs.
“More than just supposed, that is who I am. It is the flesh-and-blood before you.”
“No, Tive is a fictional character. You are in a costume.”
“And you are the famous Harsech Vandertelt, dead and gone. Am I to believe you’re just a costume, too?”
“Now hold on just one minute. At least I used to be real! You’re nothing but an arrangement of letters on a page.”
“Oh, but that means I’ve never died like you have! That gives me more of a right to be alive than you do.”
And so you can imagine for yourself how they’d carry on and on about who’s the real one. They’d use all sorts of intricate rhetorical machineries to point out inconsistencies and errors in their alibis. But there’s no way to end such arguments. A perfect answer to the question of what is real and what is not eludes even the living. The two found this out quite quickly. And what’s worse, they couldn’t even agree to disagree.
“That’s quite enough,” Harsech shouted, “I’m leaving.”
“Good luck with that.”
Harsech made his way out of the gala hall, through the half-circled double-doors toward the kitchen, past the chefs and platers and dishwashers, down the back exit to the loading dock, and toward the paranormal adventure from whence he came. Quite quickly the sounds of the synctown returned. The gusts. The gales. Air bumbling through conduit tubing like whispers. Like a whisper from that man over there, the one speaking to the woman dressed as one of the Pollie-Plomp twins. She gasped and giggled. Immodest gossip, it seemed. They were looking right at him from across the gala hall.
“They think we’re fucking,” Tive offered.
“Vivid wonder, what are you doing here?”
“I’d be right to ask you the same question. Weren’t you leaving?”
“I did—I was! I…” And Harsech looked to the double-doors, who were still swinging on their hinges from when he pushed them open mere moments ago.
He tried again. He chose a different set of doors this time, taking the ones that the porter had emerged from. This brought him through utility corridors, past valves and wheels on steampipes. The rumble returned and he clambered desperately down the tower’s central stairwell. In the vestibule he groped for his outerwear, gripping the purple fabric which reminded him so strongly of his undercoat. It was the sleeve of the chiton between his thumb and forefinger. Harsech’s hand had found Tive’s shoulder, and he’d accidentally revealed the bite to the gossiping pair from earlier. They pointed and gasped, whispered between themselves, and the male axial lover flicked his hand away.
“Now they know we’re fucking.”
“No, we’re not.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I’m not gay, and I only get fucked by girls who hate me.”
He tried a third time. His torchlight shimmered against the tiled floors like arclight on tableware, and it was a party. He tried a fourth time. The musk of the tower’s stale air was like a bad perfume, and it was a party. A fifth time. A party. A sixth time. A party. Seven. Eight. Nine. Party, party, party.
And that last time it was those senseless flowers that did him in! The pickellas and lerédeens and their misplaced meaning! He was doing so well. He was almost out the front door until he errantly thought of what they could represent. He became tangled in their vines, and in an instant he was back where he started.
There must be a way out. Again he tried, eyes closed. Again, ears covered. Again, nostrils clenched. Again. Again. Again.
Tive il Nolke, by this point, was slouching so deeply into his chair that it seemed to be devouring him. The boredom and repetition of it all had infected his body like an intestinal worm.
“Stop already,” he whimpered pathetically, “I can’t take much more of this.”
“Get a hold of yourself. What’s gotten you so glum? I’m the one who’s trying to escape.” Harsech eyed wildly around the room, looking for some solution to this puzzle.
“It’s just all so obvious. It’s so uninspired. I can’t help but be wounded by it. I have a pleasure-seeking personality, you know. I’m allergic to boredom. It’s in my nature, in my arrangement of letters.” He mocked.
“Then go somewhere else.”
“Can’t. The thread between us is taut and growing shorter. Look at them over there. They’re concocting all sorts of lurid fantasies about us. They’re sewing us together into a pair. What a misery it is…”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve never been a character before, have you? Poor Harsech Vandertelt… You used to be such a powerful figure. An accomplished paranormal investigator, a discoverer of electricity, a mighty avawatush whose enormous wake will ripple through all of history…”
“I don’t have time for your cryptic jargon.” Harsech said sharply.
The sardonic voice continued. “...but now you’re just a lowly character. Like me. Blown about by the whims of a story. To be cut up, transplanted, rearranged, retold and misrepresented, never to be forgotten…”
“Shut up you fool! Shut up!”
Tive’s dull face curled into an insidious smile. “Make me.”
But the sadomasochist’s attempts to get a fight out of the dead investigator were unsuccessful. Harsech was not the type to come to blows. And so, to sate Tive’s pathological hunger for stimulation, they went looking for another story.
SECTION 7 — MISSING PEOPLE
It took a quarter-shift of mingling around the gala hall for Harsech to identify the underlying commonality between the guests. Everyone was either dead or fictional.
First they had introduced themselves to a grizzled pair of police constables. It was Nori from Nori and Jomulus and Grovert from Zicher and Grovert. Despite the fact they were both fictional, they asserted their identity as forcefully as Tive. They spoke at length about their supposed lives and careers. They were so self-consistent, so adamant. Harsech wondered if they had been hypnotized.
Grovert told them a story from the eighth episode. They were chasing a criminal through New Galina’s tram network. He gave the four of them portable radios with which to coordinate. They split up, each taking a different train. Harsech, through the rules of the Process, isolated the perp to a particular tram car. The rest of them converged on the target’s location. Grovert ordered the tram driver to lock the doors so he couldn’t escape. They boarded the car. He had a weapon! There was a scuffle to subdue him. Nori got the criminal in his signature arm-hold. He seemed to be caught until he broke away and made a mad dash for the emergency exit. But he collided with Tive who had been lazily spectating in the background. The presso went flying and his chiton was yanked down yet again. Nori and Grovert pointed at his scar in astonishment, “you’re one of the axial lovers!” They exclaimed. Tive and Harsech excused themselves after that.
Then they found one of the Krayda brothers. Even though he’d been publicly executed in 3403 CM he was now very much “alive” again, at least in the way Harsech was. The three went on an adventure to locate the spot where he and his brother had buried the Unale hereditary treasure. During the rock-climbing segment the clasp of Tive’s chiton undid itself again. The Krayda brother pointed at him, “you’re one of the axial lovers!”
Then there was the air-ace co-pilot Mavie Parvel, then Aric Kiverban without Lammy Kiverban, then just the older Dwarza sister. Tive had unintentionally exposed himself to each of them.
“What’s the deal with that outfit you’re wearing?” Harsech commented as they walked away from Miss Dwarza’s musical number, “It doesn’t seem to be very good at its job.”
“To the contrary, Harsech, it would be worse if I wore something else,” he grouched, “its fabric would be torn to shreds. At least this thing has a quick-release.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Look at me, Harsech. I’m just a random liternidic typ from the Axial Moment. How are people supposed to know I’m one of the axial lovers if they can’t get a glimpse at my bite mark?”
Harsech raised his hands in bewilderment. “Oh, so you’re doing it on purpose? I thought you were just a sadomasochist. Now you’re an exhibitionist?”
“You don’t get it, Harsech. I’m not the one doing it.”
“Then who is?”
Tive sighed impatiently and looked around the room. “Harsech, have you noticed something about the people at this party?”
Happy for the subject change, Harsech answered. “Yes, they’re either made up or dead, just like you and I.” In saying so, he caught himself. He had missed something. “No, that’s not everything… There’s something else.”
Harsech examined the guests. He recognized them all, even those from after his time. His eyes darted from one person to the next. Just the one brother, just the older sister, the husband without the wife, a major without his sidekick, the sidekick without his major… There it was. They were all famous duos, some real and some fictional, but all of them separated from their partners. Their other half conspicuously absent.
“Say, Tive,” said Harsech, “where is your lover? What’s her name… Vindica? Vindica Soule?”
“Don’t know. Where’s yours? Where’s Wellsen?”
Harsech thought about explaining the author’s contrivance about the price of train tickets, but decided against it. “We’re all split pairs,” he mulled, “plucked from every point in time… But how? How did we all get here?”
“I think that’s the wrong question,” Tive said, “Don’t get me wrong, ‘how’ has gotten us quite far as a species, hasn’t it? How do I make a fire? How do I navigate this river? How do I grow these crops? How do I fuck this girl? Such a productive question. But it hasn’t gotten you anywhere in this particular situation, has it?”
“Since when were you a philosopher?”
Tive continued, “How did I get here? How do I escape? How do I keep this straight man who’s following me entertained? You’re running in circles.”
“Then do tell, what’s the better question?”
“Why. Why are we here?”
Harsech bristled at the absurdity. That was a question of intent, and the world reveals itself time and time again to be rather disinterested in such things. Harsech said as much.
“But this isn’t the world, Harsech. You’re dead. You won’t even deny that. And you met the author himself. This is a story. So ask yourself, why are we here?”
“Who can say why authors do the things they do,” Harsech said apprehensively, “it all seems random to me.”
“No, Harsech. You yourself are a storyteller. You told me a story only a few sections ago. Answer me. Why?”
“This is an incorrigibly foolish conversation.—”
“It’s because,” Tive interrupted, “the author thought it would be interesting.”
Harsech tried to stalk away, but Tive simply followed.
“You have to accept it, Harsech. You’re a character now. Start asking why things happen the way they do instead of how.”
“By your own logic I can’t! Asking how is the way I debunked all those ghost stories. It’s how we discovered electricity. It’s in my nature.”
“Just as this scar on my shoulder is my nature. It’s my characterization. For me to be fully represented in a story, my scar must be revealed. It’s part of me. It defines me. When Tive Il Nolke enters a scene, his love bite is not far behind. Otherwise, how can the audience know he’s one of the axial lovers?”
“Talking in third person doesn’t suit you.”
Tive continued, “Nobody remembers the names “Tive il Nolke” and “Vindica Soule,” they only remember what we did in the bedroom. That’s the only thing people pay attention to in that semester of history class. And I don’t blame them.”
Harsech groaned and rubbed the shallow of his eyes with his palms. It made an insane kind of sense. “Fine then, from your perspective, explain to me why we’re here.”
“It’s simple. Everyone knows how we dance with our partners. They’ve seen it all before. The audience wants something new. Who is Harsech without Wellsen? How does he dance alone? How does he dance with the male axial lover? How does he dance with this crowd?”
“But none of those questions are truly answered if this is a story. Stories aren’t real.”
“They’re real enough.”
Harsech crossed his arms to stop himself from fidgeting. If what Tive had been saying was true, then the fundamental nature of reality had changed. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. His durnalitic upbringing urged him to accept reality as it is. To do otherwise would be to reject himself. But what if this was no longer reality? And if this wasn’t reality, what was it?
“So,” Harsech finally said, unable to look in Tive’s direction, “supposing you’re right, what do we do about it?”
Tive shrugged. “We dance.”
And with that Harsech couldn’t take any more. In a last ditch effort to escape he leaped across the page, diving past the upcoming section break, hoping against hope that he’d land somewhere far, far away.
SECTION 8 — DARKROOM
It took me almost five hundred attempts to get this right, the forgotten woman seemed to say. She was showing the unnamed boy the experiment she had made. He took the replacement inset in his hand, and peered into the film it contained. Even with his young eyes he could barely distinguish the two holes from each other, they were so narrow and so close. He wasn’t even sure if he could see the holes at all.
The darkroom was lit by nothing but a cold electric flame that had been set in one corner. It cast what little it touched in an unnatural ocean blue. It was another monochromatic source, like the flash-wicks. But this one was precisely the wavelength that wouldn’t expose her photographic plate. This would be the job of the flash-wicks. She would capture their pattern.
She led the boy over to the plate. It was mounted on a floor-stand in front of her lightproof box. Etched in the corner were the numbers 233. With her fingers she drew the path that light would take, from the box to the plate.
She had built an inverted pinhole camera. Instead of light from the outside world entering the box and exposing a photograph, it went the other way around. Light from the inside escaped, exposing the outside world.
And what a wonder it is, the brightness required for that light to be visible in its escape. A brilliant, blinding flare reduced to a dim beam. It is the eucentric ideal. People are spirits of great power, limited only by their connection to the world.
She lit a number of wicks. They began to smoulder. She tossed them into the lightproof box and took the inset from the boy, sealing the wicks inside. They waited.
Common sense would say that adding a second hole would simply make the beam brighter. And on a purely technical level this is true. More energy leaves the box, and so something must be brighter. But common sense is misleading. It fools you into thinking you know more than you actually do. As Harsech would say of any phenomenon, “first you know nothing, but you must learn to know even less.”
The wicks go off. Now you see the pattern.
As if projected through window blinds, the light was struck-through with horizontal lines of darkness. The little boy looked between the plate and the box, searching for whatever was causing the shadows. But there was no such thing. Only empty air.
Those lines were called fringes, and there were just enough to make it difficult to count how many there were. It was the kind of pattern that resisted quantification. Should you try to count the lines by sight you’d find your vision spin and jerk as your eyes tried to make sense of the perfect repetition. No such pattern occurs in nature. It is only in artificial darkness that light’s true nature is revealed.
Light, being an oscillating value in the electromagnetic aether, could cancel out or emphasize other oscillations. It was just the same as the constructive and destructive interference of the waves on a water’s surface. Those dark lines were such cancellations. They were where the preferences of the beams disagreed.
She pointed at the centermost fringe. Whereas all the others had some curve to them, this one was perfectly level. It seemed to define a horizon. She followed her finger along it, into the distance, toward the darkness. This was a path. A route. This would be how they make their escape. Hiding between the glares of two brilliant beams. She took the unnamed boy's hand and they walked along the horizon, toward the darker side of the room. Away. Away, away.
The flash-wicks burned themselves out, and they were gone.
But photographic plate number 233 remained. It had recorded definitive proof of the wave nature of light. It was shared by the Vandertelts with their society of natural philosophers. This truly was a breakthrough of Moment-making proportion. It would lead to the unification of electrical, magnetic, and optical phenomena into a single theory. It would change everything.
She could’ve been in every textbook on the topic. But it had been the Vandertelts themselves who presented plate number 233. They were the ones who got the credit. Had the textbook and monograph authors been more attribution minded, or had the Vandertelts been more forthright, then history could have remembered the plate as a product of her labour. But they hadn’t, and so it didn’t.
The forgotten woman would not be famous.
And then there was the Tegris city fire in 142 EM, forty-eight months after Harsech succumbed to age. It had destroyed almost every building in the city centre, including the Vandertelt scientific archives. Plate number 233 had been stored there, along with the lightproof box, the films with their pinpricks, and even her notebooks. People had volunteered to brave the fire to rescue its artefacts. Wellsen had urged them to prioritize the wing that held his dear Harsech’s files. The forgotten woman’s works were on the opposite side. They would be consumed entirely by flame.
The forgotten woman would not be recorded.
And finally, as Wellsen lay in his own deathbed, clinging to life with only two working ventricles, he spoke with a biographer about his life. They landed on the topic of the true nature of light. He explained his protégé’s experiment. He spoke of the lost plate number 233. He spoke about how she’d been brilliantly bright herself, a vivid wonder in her own right. She’d made the breakthrough while doing some busywork about flowers. Where had she gone after she made that discovery? She must’ve done something else for science, surely. If only he could remember her name… Or maybe he was just mistaken…
The forgotten woman would not be remembered.
And so, because of all that, she would not be invited to the party. She and the boy would instead continue their walk toward the horizon, enjoying their cold, quiet, peaceful dark. Forever.
SECTION 9 — BANQUET
But Harsech had overshot his leap, missing the previous section by a great distance. The party had followed. The sounds were as joyous as ever. What a misery. At this moment he only wished to die properly. For good.
He landed in a heap on a long sofa. He banged the yielding cushions with a fist. It just didn’t make sense. Harsech had never been able to handle nonsense.
Tive wandered up to him. “Are you done? I’m bored.”
Harsech’s voice was muffled by pillows. “Leave me alone you deranged pervert.”
“Can’t. As I said, we’re tied together now. Anyway, I thought you should know that they’re serving the banquet now. If you’re hungry.”
His stomach clenched at the first mention of food. Such a basic instinct cut through the nonsense. He might be dead, but he still had to eat.
Harsech hadn’t counted how many were at this party, but the sheer number of tables gave an implausible estimate. Somehow nearly all of the seats were taken, and those that hadn’t been were filling up fast. All sorts of people in all sorts of costumes threaded themselves between the tables and chairs, trying to secure a place. Harsech and Tive split up to find their own free spaces alone. In spite of their efforts they nonetheless found themselves sitting across from each other yet again. They really were sewn together.
Just a few minutes later everyone was settled. All was in its right place. Every seat had been accounted for, and every person had a seat.
The table was set with the standard formal dishware and cutlery. High-lipped plates and dipping basins. Spoons, wedges, and tongs. Each person had a round glass for presso, a stout glass for water, and a tall glass for tibicos, whichever they’d prefer.
Between Harsech and Tive lay a small bouquet of pickellas and lerédeens. Harsech thought about asking the axial lover about it, decided against it, but against his nerve asked anyway.
“Say, Tive,” Harsech gestured at the display, “what do these represent?”
“What, the flowers? Ah, You wouldn’t know, would you? They’re not a custom of the living. They mean ‘welcome to the party.’”
“‘Welcome to the party?’”
“That's what I said.”
“What party?”
Tive raised his arms to gesture at everything. “This is the party. Welcome.”
“You know what I mean. What is this party, exactly?”
Tive’s attention was elsewhere. “Can’t you quiet down? They’re announcing the courses.”
An important looking chef was at the end of the table listing off ingredients and methods of preparation. He had a wide smile, hands clasped. Everything he said was decadent.
They would be treated to a six course meal. Frosted millets with torched cobia. Harkseed patties smothered in bile reduction. Tench-and-thistle aspic. Dandy slough in semol. A freshly picked rootclip salad. And for the finisher, a puff-compote in an oil stabilizer. Even the planchettic kings didn’t eat this good.
Tive had a finger against his teeth, gnawing on its nail. The gap between knowing that food would be coming and actually getting said food seemed to make him quite antsy. Harsech thought it best to distract him.
“Tive? What’s the party?”
“Hm? Oh yes. It’s the endless, inescapable mingling of characters. The literary canon. You must be familiar. Anyone who reads is familiar.”
“Endless? Inescapable? You mean it will always be like this?” Harsech could take a lot of things, but not this. Not forever.
Tive might’ve been a pathological pleasure-seeking sadomasochist, but he was still a lover. He leaned across the table to steady Harsech’s hand. He almost sounded sympathetic. “Oh Harsech, do you miss your other?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll see him again soon. It’s only this one author who has decided to separate you, and to take ‘party’ so literally. There will be many more stories from many more authors. More with you together than apart, I’m sure.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Positive. Someone reading this story right now might even take it upon themselves to write a reunion between you two. So look forward to that. Now, where-oh-where is this first course they taunted us with—Oh, oh! Vivid wonder! The food is here!”
While it was remarkable that Tive was able to make Harsech feel better at all, his sympathy paled in comparison to what the smell of the first course was able to achieve. The scent of well-cooked fish heals most ills, after all. Harsech watched eagerly as the servers moved along the table, serving each person in turn, getting closer and closer. The food looked incredible. But then, because his mind was never one to stop mulling, something occurred to him. “If this is indeed a story, I think I know why we’re tied together.”
Tive was distracted by the incoming food and answered without looking. “Why’s that.”
“We both ended a Moment. I ended the Contemporary with electricity, you ended the Axial with your…” He couldn’t find the polite words.
Tive laughed. “I didn’t end shit. I just hate-fucked a kinky girl. Simple as that. Everything afterward was multicausal. The end of the doctrinal wars isn’t how they defined the Axial Moment, anyway.”
“So how did they define it?”
Finally the servers got to them. Their dishes were placed before them, and this was when Tive’s patience for conversation completely evaporated. “What do I look like, an encyclopedia? Leave me alone. Eat your food.” He reached for a vase of glint-spice and poured it all over his millets-with-cobia, rendering it inedible to anyone but himself.
Harsech took his spoon. He could feel the final section break coming up. He could feel it in his soul. It was true then, that this was a story.
He scooped at his own millets-with-cobia, bringing a heap to his mouth. It was delicious. And it made sense. Of course he would eat in this scene. And of course it would be great. Who in their right mind would end a story with a disappointing meal?
Stories had their own kind of physics to them, Harsech thought. A list of rules based on emotion, tropes, and grammar. Maybe he had died because he’d finally understood everything one needed to know about the world of natural, mathematical law. He won that game. Now a new element of his mind has revealed itself. The world of stories.
Maybe he could apply his Process here, in this strange place. He might have to tweak a few steps. Perhaps redefine what an observation is, or the precise boundary of falsifiability. He knew nothing about the nature of this world, but he was sure with enough time he could learn to know even less. And that would be a start.
Transcription note: The following section was included in the first publication of How to Leave a Party in the Mesei Ti. However, it was excluded from all subsequent re-publishings and syndications. It is reproduced here for posterity.
SECTION 10 — JUST A FEW COINS TO GET HOME
And so you close that section, satisfied and confused in equal measure, and find the author sitting next to you on the train ride home. He is presently being chastised by the fare enforcer for not paying his return ticket. Graciously you lend him the money and the enforcer returns to his rounds. The author thanks you copiously.
You ask him about what happened back there. What does it all mean? He reminds you that all of this was pure speculation. He never got off the train at the synctown, after all. Hope you didn’t forget that. Hope you didn’t take any of this as eyewitness testimony.
The train slowly crosses the terminator of Mound. Ornament rises steadily from the horizon as if lifted by a crane. He tells you that nobody alive could say for certain if the supposed “party” is real or fake or fictional. Only the made up or dead can know that. And neither of you, at time of writing, are dead yet. “And we sure as shit aren’t made up,” says the author.
Finally, as the train pulls into his station and you say your goodbyes, the author makes you a promise. A repayment for your kindness. If he dies before you, and his spirit becomes trapped in that grand party of the Sephied Synctown, the only place where both the historical and the invented mingle forever… If that should happen, then he promises to write you a letter to let you know.
But you don’t believe him, because only a minute later you look out the train window and see the author approach a drink vendor. He pulls two crisp bills out of his satchel and buys an overdressed bowl of melé worth more than a ticket to ride. The train pulls away before you can take him to task by hollering out the window. And it is this moment, this situation that teaches you a lesson which will serve you well for the rest of your life: Never trust an author.
See you later, schmuck.