First it was a Democratic debate. Then it was a Republican debate. Now it's… an election? Look. I can understand that I sometimes have to wait on 60 Minutes until they can get a football game out of the way, but I'm asking you, can't politics do a better job of keeping my schedule in mind? This is the third week in a row when this post got bumped to… what time is it, anyway?
And here's something I just found out. The Caucasus? They're not even in the United States! They're over in Europe somewhere. Like… in the eastern part. So why are we even paying attention to how people are voting in the Caucasus? I mean, I'm not one of those "not invented here" guys but still…
Caucuses? Not… But it sounds like… Oh. Really? Never mind.
Anyway, here's episode four. Denny gets out of the Human Quarter and goes to visit the one human who doesn't live in their little mellah. So we get a bit of a walking tour of Jukal Plex, and spend a little time with skynx. We also get a little closer to the core of this thing… though it might not seem that way at first.
As usual, there's superfragilistic art from Amy Jones, and you can zip over to the podcast version, which tonight is read by both actor Raymond Shinn and mystery writer Rett Macpherson.
Special bonus time: at the very end of this post is a reward for either 1) reading the whole thing or 2) being a cheater.
Let's go see…
DIMSDAY
8
On Dimsday, Denny took a walk. In the stuttering grey-blue light of Dimsday morning, Denny left the compartment building and hurried down the central street that ran through the human quarter.
The street had no actual name, just a number in the massive snarl of Jukal Plex, but someone—someone long ago—had put up a sign that said Oak Street. Denny knew what a street was, but he had no idea what "Oak" meant.
At the end of the narrow street, Denny passed between the two low, blocky buildings that guarded the edge of the quarter. The old gate and razor-edged cutwire had been taken down in the last year, but you could still see the heavy posts where they had once been bolted to the walls. In the half-light, with the bright point of the tiny blue sun still just below the horizon, everything seemed, not just dim and shadowy, but actually made of shadows. Like a dream—though not an especially good one.
Denny wondered if cithians dreamed. He had never thought to ask Omi. Unlike humans, cithians slept just once during every day cycle, but that sleep was a long one. They would shuffle into the sleeping stadiums when the chilly end of Skimsday was near, and most of them wouldn’t come out again until both suns were shining again. On Dimsday, most of the population of the city would be unconscious.
Just outside the quarter were the empty sleeping stadiums where the staff of the Human Assistance Authority had rested, and the even larger buildings where humans had been tested and examined when they were being brought into Jukal Plex. Nearly all of the buildings were empty now. The only lights were around the smaller building where the Overcontroller, Omi and the few remaining guards were sleeping.
Passing through all the long, empty spaces, Denny wondered what it had been like when these buildings had been filled with people coming in from other places. Had they been excited to be there? Had they been worried? A few people had come to Jukal in the last few years, but only a handful, and most of those had already been consigned again somewhere else.
Denny tried to peek into one of the silent halls, but there was nothing to see but darkness. It must have been very different back when there were hundreds, or even thousands, of humans coming here. Everything crowded and noisy and busy. Maybe it would be like that again, once they were consigned to somewhere else.
Denny came out into Jukal and stayed on the perimeter of the great plex, so most of the largest buildings were still some ways off in the distance, looming up out of the darkness. Even though it was almost all the way on the far side of the city, the Cataclysm stood higher than everything else. There was a gap between the tall white spike and the rest of the plex. Denny knew there was a wall between it and the other buildings, though he had never been close enough to see much more than that.
The cithians had tried to do something special at the Cataclysm. Make some kind of power plant said some of the old stories. Build too high, said another–though that didn’t make sense to Denny, since shuttles went higher every day. Whatever had happened, it was bad, and now anyone who got too close to the Cataclysm would die. Which seemed like a good reason to stay far away.
The sections of the plex where Denny traveled were typical for the edges of Jukal. There were the big stadiums where most of the cithians slept away Dimsday, nestled in piles with little regard for rank. Cithians didn't have family homes—didn't really have families—so the arrangement kind of made sense, though Denny was glad that humans didn't live that way. He wouldn't have liked listening to Poppa Jam snore. Around these sleeping stadiums were domed buildings for storage and tall cubes where the cithians did... whatever it was that most cithians did for most of the cycle. Despite the new rules, humans still weren't allowed in most of the cithian buildings. The Overcontroller said it was for their own safety. Cithian workers had to concentrate on their work. They couldn't be looking out for foolish, careless, easily injured humans.
Each grouping of buildings was connected to the rest by streets and by the ground transport. Some were even hooked together by the tall sky transports or by air taxis. Humans weren't allowed on either of those. Denny might have taken the ground transport, but sometimes the pods weren't all running on Dimsday. Even if he got a road ferry to stop for him, he didn't know how to give directions to where he was going. And he was almost out of credits. So he just kept walking.
On most days, the streets between the buildings would have been crowded with cithians, and Denny would have spent much of his time just staying out of their way, but this was Dimsday. On Dimsday, even most of those cithians who were still awake stayed in the stadiums, resting during the near darkness. Now just about the only cithians he saw were the darting yellow shapes of the very young, and those like Omi, fresh off a molt, with the plastic shells on their backs and their soft bodies covered in cloth. The moltlings moved around slowly, clumsily, unable to rest with the other cithians until their new shells had at least started to harden. They really couldn't do much, not even make a warning rumble, but Denny stayed away from them as much as he could.
He made his way down the nearly empty streets, being careful to cross when he had to, dodging around the occasional road ferry, giving as much room to the few adult cithians he met as he could. Even so, more than one cithian rumbled at Denny, thumping their clangers against their shells in a sound that was half threat, half alarm. Twice Denny was stopped by cithians who had the red slash of the Jukal Plex Legal Authority stripped across their shells. One of these made Denny empty his backpack, and spilled half his water before accepting that it was just water. Fortunately, Denny still had the purple cube in his pocket, and no one found it.
Slowly the flickering light of the blue sun wheeled around the perimeter of the sky. The winds that sliced in along the curving streets were actually chilly enough to make Denny shiver. He kind of wished now that he had a big jacket, like Yulia. He also wished there was a way to capture some of that coolness and keep it with him. He would be happy to have it when Whetsday swung around again.
Denny was very tired and thirsty by the time he caught sight of the black lake glimmering in the half-light. A curve of land swept out into the black lake, and on the end of this curve was a series of very small buildings made of stone that matched the shimmer of the sky. There were lights out there in pale pink and faded green, lights that were reflected into smears on the dark waters. Denny turned off the broad road and walked through the more twisty paths that lead out to the skynx community.
Unlike the cithians, the skynx liked to live in small groups of one, or two, or three. They kept small, neat little houses that were as close to the water as they could get. Those that were not directly against the black lake were raised up a bit so that the skynx inside could see down to the waters. As far as Denny could tell, none of the homes was more than a few steps from the shore. The skynx liked water.
As Denny got closer, he could see that some of the skynx were out and moving between the homes. Even more of them were actually in the waters of the lake. The little paddles that lined the sides of the skynx' flexible bodies seemed as good at moving them around in water as they were on land. Under the faint bluish light of Dimsday, the skynx' red-brown bodies were as black as the waters of the little lake, but they moved fast enough to carve curling wakes in the still water. Several times Denny saw a skynx throw itself completely free of the water, twist, glistening, through the air, and come back to the lake with only the slightest splash. Whether it was for a purpose or just for fun, Denny couldn't say. Maybe this was another kind of skynx dancing.
The first of the skynx that Denny encountered on the street ignored him. They slipped around him on their long, low bodies, moving past as if he was just another obstacle. It wasn't until he stood in the center of the path and called out "'Scuse me" that one of the skynx actually stopped and turned his way. The skynx raised its head until it was nearly as tall as Denny.
"Yes?" it asked. It had the same fast, chirpy voice as every other skynx Denny had ever met.
"I'm looking for a human."
"Human?" A ripple moved through the paddles at the front of the skynx' long body. "They are there," it said, shaping its front paddles into an arrow that pointed back the way Denny had come.
"Not the human quarter," said Denny. "Just one. Old Loma." In response, the skynx dropped back to its paddles and took off along the path at such a pace that Denny had to run to keep up.
Two years before, when the Human Assistance Authority had consigned Denny's father and so many others from Jukal off to new locations, Overcontroller Hiser had announced that the rules which said that humans had to stay in the quarter were being relaxed. It was a big surprise to the few humans left. From now on, humans would be allowed to travel around the city as they pleased, so long as they didn't get on any of the transports leaving Jukal Plex. And, of course, so long as they showed the proper respect to their cithian hosts. And stayed away from cithian buildings, and didn't interfere with cithian transports, and stayed especially far away from the Cataclysm.
Most humans had been excited to get a chance to see more of the great city where generations of humans had lived, but never really been a part. Denny still liked to visit the spaceport, and watch the many different peoples who visited the markets and squares near the center of the city. Auntie Talla also got out into the city, shopping for food at the market, and trading things she cooked. A few others, like Kettle, had even gotten jobs out among the citizens of Jukal. But many of the humans had found that giving the cithians proper respect meant always waiting for an empty transport or walking on the sunny side of a hot street on Whetsday so cithians could enjoy the shade. That made traveling around the city less pleasant. Many had found it was easier to just stay in the quarter.
When it came to places to live, even though the authority would now allow them to travel to most areas, the humans still lived in the quarter. All but one.
Denny was just about to decide that the skynx he was following didn't really know Old Loma and was't taking him anywhere in particular, when the low figure stopped at the front of one of the tiny houses. "The human is here," it said. Then it left, moving faster than ever.
From what Denny could see, the house looked like the other houses. Same low doors. Same pink and green lights. Same walls made from stone that was, close up, actually more like melted glass. It didn't look like a human place. Even so, he went to the small door at the corner and rapped against it with his knuckles.
It turned out that the door was more like a thick curtain, changing Denny's knocks into soft thumps. He rapped again at the frame. "Old Loma?" he said. "Are you here?"
The door curtain was suddenly swept aside. The woman on the other side was short, short enough that the skynx' door seemed well suited to her. She wore a loose robe crossed by dark bands, and her hair was a thin, fly-away tangle of white puffs. Her eyes stared at Denny with an expression that seemed more angry than surprised.
"Old Loma, I'm..."
"You're Carrel's boy," she said, cutting him off. She leaned out the door for a moment and looked along the dimly-lit path behind Denny. "You alone?"
"Yes, I..."
Loma held the door open wider. "Get in here," she said. "Quickly."
Denny stepped into the house, and the door immediately fell back into place. For a moment, the room was truly dark, and Denny saw nothing but nothing. Then a light flashed on. Like some of the lights outside, it had a pinkish tone. The room it revealed was small, low-ceilinged, and cramped from top to bottom with shelves, papers, and small boxes that Denny didn't recognize. Old Loma stepped around him. She looked older than Denny remembered from the last time she had been in the quarter. He supposed she was older. There were new creases in the skin of her face, and the whites of her eyes had taken on a yellow tint that did nothing to soften her expression.
"What are you doing here, Carrel's boy?"
"I..." Denny stopped and cleared his throat. "Old Loma, I'm here to..."
"Don't call me that," she said, cutting him off again. "I feel old enough without you reminding me."
"Nonni Loma?"
"Just Loma will do," Loma said. She walked slowly around Denny. "You've grown."
Denny shrugged. "You've been gone."
9
Denny took a drink of the water. "Is this from the lake?" he asked.
Loma gave a snort. "I hope not." She leaned toward one of the room's small windows and pushed aside a curtain. For just a moment, Denny could see the skynx sliding across the inky water. "There are so many heavy metals dissolved in that lake, a glass of it would likely be the last thing you ever drank."
"Doesn't it bother the skynx?"
"Nah. They like it that way." Loma let the curtain close and crossed the room to settle herself on a low pillow that seemed to be the closest thing in the room to a chair. She pushed a few of the things that Denny thought were small boxes out of her way, and he was surprised to see that the boxes weren't boxes at all. They had pages, like a picture book, though he didn't see any pictures.
Loma stared up at Denny, her dark eyes shining from the deep folds of her face. "Now tell me. What made you take such a long hike?”
Denny had thought so much about finding his way to Loma, that he had forgotten to put much thought into what he might say when he found her. "I was dancing," he began, "and there was a chug..." He fished into his pocket. "It gave me this." Loma leaned toward him, her attention fixed on Denny's hand as he pulled out the purple cube. Her eyes went wide and she let out a low sound. “Uhhhh." She pushed down at his hand and looked up quickly at both the door and the window. She started to reach for the cube, then stopped.
Loma climbed up from her cushion and went back to the door. She tied a rope from the edge of the curtain to the wall, then tested the curtain with a tug. It didn't open. Loma nodded and rubbed her hands against her robe at her hips, as if she were wiping dirt from her hands. Or sweat.
"All right," she said. "Give it here."
Denny hadn't thought much about the cube at first, and had been willing to trade it to Poppa Jam for a picture book, but seeing how much Loma reacted to the little thing made him reluctant I hand it over. He held out his hand slowly. The little cube seemed heavier than before.
Loma seemed almost as reluctant to take it, but after a moment her fingers darted to Denny's palm and she lifted the small, purplish object. She held it in front of her face. Then she walked closer to one of the pink lights and turned the cube back in forth in front of the glow. Once again, Denny could see how all the different colors came and went in the light.
"You're not supposed to have this," said Loma. "Where did you get it?"
Denny hesitated for a moment, trying to think of what to say, but if he was going to get in trouble for having this thing, he guessed he was already in trouble. He told Loma about going to the spaceport, and how the chug had watched him, and about singing Judy. "When I was done, the chug gave it to me. Is it... dangerous?"
"Dangerous?" Loma gave a little snort, then did it again.
It took Denny a moment to think she might actually be laughing.
"Yah. Yah, maybe. It could be dangerous. For you... and for others." She flipped the cube over in her fingers for a few seconds longer, then turned and held it up where Denny could see the color-slick sides. "It's a memory."
A memory. Denny looked down at the shiny surface of the little box. He could remember playing with the other children in the street outside the food dispersal center. He could remember his father working with Auntie Talla to pound out the stove. He could remember the awful feeling as his father was dragged out of the gather room for consignment. "Memories are just in your head," he said.
"Nah. This isn't that kind of memory," said Loma. Again she looked toward the door, and she lowered her voice so that Denny had to strain to hear her. "It's for a maton. This cube that tells them how to work."
Denny turned the idea over in his mind. He'd seen simple matons. Cithians sometimes carried them around, and he knew they used them for whatever it was they did in those buildings humans never entered. Some of the road ferries had them, and matons could take the ferry where it needed to go even if there was no cithian to drive it. Even the buttons that talked for the dasiks were a kind of maton.
But there were other kinds of matons, as well. Ones that were supposed to be seriously bad. If you saw anything that you thought might be a maton, you were supposed to tell someone, and humans were not supposed to touch them. Not ever.
"Matons are dangerous," said Denny. "If you touch one..."
"If you touch one, what happens?"
"You can die. Or at least get really sick.”
The woman looked thoughtful. "Yah... Well, maybe. Maybe not." She rolled the small cube between her fingers. "I don't have a maton—restricted technology, no humans allowed—but I have something else." She turned away from Denny and went to one corner of the room where a stack of the little no-pictures books were heaped nearly waist high. From the top of the stack, she took an off-white something that was about the same size as one of the books, but had the hard gleam of metal or plastic.
"I'm not really supposed to have even this," she said, stroking one thing finger along the top of the little device. "But some of the skynx think it's funny to give me things."
"Why?" asked Denny.
That brought another snort-laugh from Loma. "In two years of living with the skynx, about the only thing I've learned is that you don't ask 'why.' They don't have a reason. Or if they do, it's not a reason you or me can understand." She touched the whitish thing somewhere on one side, and a small opening appeared at the top. She tipped it slightly, and showed Denny that there was something inside. He stepped closer. It was another cube. As far as he could tell, it was the same size as the one the chug had given him, only this one was a pale blue instead of purple. Loma touched another spot on the device, and at once a loud sound began. Denny jumped back, bumped against another stack of the books, and nearly fell, before he realized that the device was making music.
Sometimes, especially when they were having restaurant, some of the people back in the quarter liked to make music. Cousin Kettle had an instrument, a string-jo, that had come from his father, or his father's father, or somebody before that, and he knew how to make the twangs and strums that went with several songs. Poppa Jam would beat his hands against the table in time to Kettle's playing, and if she was in a good mood, Auntie Talla would sing. Sometimes even Cousin Yulia would forget her fear long enough to sing along. Yulia could sing really well. But even the best music Denny had ever heard in restaurant was nothing like this.
This was music made of every kind of sound, all playing at once, and it wasn't just noise. It was fire and light. It was metal and air. It was perfect.
Loma touched the little device again and the music stopped. "Tchaikovsky," she said.
Denny realized that he had been holding his breath. He sucked in some air and tried to get his tongue around the word that Loma has said, but it was too complicated. "What's that?"
"It's..." Loma looked thoughtful for a moment, then gave another of her snorty laughs. "I don't know. If you listen long enough, the music stops and someone says that. Just Tchaikovsky." She shrugged. "Something from the skynx, I think."
"Is that their kind of music?" Denny had been told that the skynx could dance, and had seen them do fast, slithery movements that he thought was skynx dancing. But if this was what their music was like, he could only imagine what it would be like to see them really dance.
"Maybe." Loma tilted the device to the side and the pale blue cube spilled out. She caught it and put it with a small group of others that Denny hadn't noticed until that moment. Then she took the purple cube he had brought and put it inside. "I've only seen something like this once before," she said. "The memory won't work here like it would in a maton. It may not work in here at all. But there may be something."
She pressed the side of the device. A light appeared in the center of the room. Slowly, an image formed…
SMALLPOX
10
Smallpox was a disease. It was one of the most infectious diseases ever encountered. Sometimes it was called just "pox," sometimes it was called "red plague."
If you caught the disease, your body would be covered by horrible, painful blisters; blisters that crowded every inch of your skin from your feet to your head. Blisters on the palms of your hands and the tips of your fingers. Blisters on every inch of your face. Blisters on your lips. Blisters on your eyelids. Blisters in your ears. Blisters on your tongue. Blisters even on other blisters.
If you lived through the disease, you would be covered with disfiguring scars for the rest of your life. You might also be blind. You might find that your hands and feet ached terribly all your life. You might be crippled. You might be crazy.
The people who were scarred, and blind, and crippled, and crazy were the lucky ones. Many people did not live through the disease. Smallpox killed about one third of all the people infected. It killed about two thirds of children. Year after year, for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years, smallpox killed people by the hundreds of thousands. In bad years it killed millions.
Finally, after smallpox had killed over half a billion people, it was discovered that there were ways to control the disease. All the people worked together to stop smallpox, and in an amazingly short time this disease that had killed people for centuries and millennia, was gone.
But it wasn't completely gone.
In a few places, people kept small containers with samples of the disease. They knew it was dangerous. Sometimes a little of the disease would get out, and sometimes people would die.
Still, they kept it because they were worried. They kept it because they thought that somewhere out there in the wild, in some place they hadn't yet looked, smallpox might still be around. They worried that if they destroyed their last samples, they might not understand the disease if they needed to fight smallpox again. It took them a long time to be convinced that they had gotten it all. There was no smallpox still hiding on a mountain. No smallpox lurking in a jungle or deep in a cave. There was no more smallpox, except for the tiny bits they had in their bottles.
Which meant that the bottles weren’t really needed. Not at all. Slowly, first in one place and then the next, they destroyed what was left of smallpox.
Finally, there was only a single tiny test tube left of this disease that had killed so many, scarred so many, left so many in misery. And when the people decided that it was too dangerous to keep that last little tube, they destroyed it too. Then they celebrated, because the terrible pox, the red plague, the horror of so many lifetimes, was gone.
And now, here's your reward. It's a sneak peak at the cover art for the trade paperback version of On Whetsday. Yah! Huzzah! This image came from illustrator Brian Zick, who is also Daily Kos member bz. I think you'll see instantly why I was so excited when this dropped unexpectedly in my inbox. You’ll see more of this image in upcoming weeks. I love it, and we're going to have some fun with it.