Deep dream, p.17
Deep Dream, page 17
“I’m holding myself exactly where I wish to be,” says Szor. Avni smears honey across the cuts and watches him tremble beneath her sticky palm.
He digs his hands into the old quilts of their bed, struggling to stay still. “I didn’t think it would matter.”
“What wouldn’t?”
“Who was making the art. Who was giving the pain. But it does, as much as I wish it weren’t true. No matter how tightly the veil is drawn, the viewer has to trust the artist to some degree.” The drowning-dark of his eyes find hers over his shoulder. “Like I trust you. It lets me descend into a deeper place, where my mind can move around freely, play with all the frightening things I can’t when I’m here on the surface, like pain and perversion and malice. In that space, we’re free of all exigencies of morality.”
“Ah,” she says. “You wanted to have it both ways then. A limited freedom.”
He rasps out a laugh. “You’re making fun of me now.”
“No.” She draws a finger through the red calligraphy of his back and bends to kiss each node of his spine. Between kisses, she says, “I understand the desire for control.”
He shudders. “I can take more. I want to know more.”
A new understanding settles on them like a second gravity that they cannot deny.
“The point of this,” she says, “was that you shouldn’t want more.”
“The point was.” His voice goes distant, maybe with frustration or maybe with revelation. “I thought in pain there would be confirmation of what I know. But instead, all I’ve gotten is more questions, more ambiguity. I thought you’d be a guiding hand. But it’s—you’ve given me anything but.”
She pushes his unmarked shoulder until he turns to lay flat on his back. When he has, groaning at the flensed flesh pressed into rough, warm deer hides, she smiles. “Perhaps we just haven’t reached that point of clarity yet.”
Avni straddles him and his teeth clench at the anguish of his back pressed into the bed, the hide’s fur bristling into his wounds. Folding around him, her body becomes a bowl for him to weep into. Oblivion has softened him to her, tender as new granulation and just as sensitive. She tills each site of torment with her tongue, but he feels anything but pain now. The wounds make his body too simple to resist the current of her. Under his mouth he solves a salted song and fills her like a tide.
In Avni’s family, the women recited the names of their mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers before them. Souls too beautiful to forget but lost anyway because a name could never hold them whole. Szor indexes his pain with the same loyalty, cataloging the sharpness and sting, the violent pressures and exacerbating texture, which brought him the closest to his demise. He lets those memories shape the sculpture now, embedding them in the medium like trapdoor spiders for whatever fervent human dared to breach the perimeter. A museum of anguish for humans to traverse before they’re given the power to deliver it themselves.
“You’re getting closer?” she asks while he eats his noonday meal.
“Yes,” he says, chewing. Then pauses, considering the mulberry, lambs’ quarters, and roasted potato as if they were all foreign objects. He glances at Avni with the same stern surprise, as if he’s irritated at himself for missing something crucial. He opens his mouth then shuts it. She laughs.
“Eat, then work. I’ll see you at home.”
The clouds are heavy as handfuls of stone as she walks through the shadowed paths of the sculpture. She wonders if the medium feels it too. Every lesion and drowning and induced nausea. It is not human, but it remembers what Szor provides. Grows and scabs and even dies when instructed. Where does the pain live in the medium? Would it ever communicate Szor’s truth accurately, or would it be lost in the frame of the receiver’s body? Did there ever exist a holistic symmetry between artist and viewer? She keeps her questions to herself.
An empty trail forms where her jealously once paced. Szor works and comes home, and when he looks at her, she sees an old wonder in his eyes reborn. A recognition, artist to artist.
Later in bed, they fill each other’s shadows and burn every want between them like sweetgrass. Avni knows the amount of muscle it takes to make a bruise is the same it takes to remove a root.
“Filth of my filth,” she says after, fondly, a hand bridled in his hair.
Szor hums under her touch, pets the dark side of her waist hidden from firelight. “I want you to feel it tomorrow. The sculpture.”
A quiet exhale of a laugh. “Getting your revenge then?”
“No. Sharing what you helped make.” He kisses the lines of her forehead. “My artist. My collaborator in everything.”
“Words I thought I’d never hear,” Avni murmurs, honeycombed with emotions she cannot name. “You want to see if the accounting of your pain held true, then?”
“Not just pain.” He cups the fine shell of her cheek. “You were right. The sculpture, it’s … tyrannous. We were—I—was trying too hard to guide it towards my family’s vision, smothering what the spirit actually needs.” He holds a cupped hand between them as if he can feel the weight of the answer there. “To thicken all the spirit knows and give weight to everything it doesn’t.”
Avni digests this, lets the implications harden into possibilities. “But the god below. How will that act as a bulwark?”
“I can’t stop humans forever. But I may be able to give them something to become more. More than what I think they’re capable of.” He turns his hand between them. It shines pink with scar tissue. “Even pain doesn’t promise empathy. It domesticates, dulls. I have to start at the foundation. I need to make it a prism. Something to turn and turn, that will never lack for a new facet. I need to destroy it. Start over.”
“That sounds like more than a safeguard now,” she says, kissing the new skin. In the dark, an easy smile she hasn’t seen in years licks across his face like a white flame. “It sounds like something that could outlast humans completely.”
“Maybe as long as the god itself.”
Szor’s slowed breathing extends between them and Avni settles beneath the silence. As long as there were gods to hide and spirits to perceive, the sculpture would endure. Souls would be tilled, but how and in what way, Avni is sure even Szor does not know. The sculpture would live, intertwined with man and more, but separable, autonomous in its offering. As gingerly as though she were touching glass, Avni brushes her hand down the scar tissue of Szor’s arm, the taut gleam catching moonlight, rendering it lustrous, almost pellucid. On the threshold of sleep, she dreams the limb is cut crystal, catching passages of light as he sculpts. The sculpture reflects it back in an infinite convergence, burning brighter and brighter, and even with her eyes closed, her vision whites out from the incandescence, burning her, swallowing her up with every known color.
8 IMMORTAL BEAUTY
Bruce Sterling
Baltasar hastened to the confessional booth, where he knelt and was scanned.
The Oracle shimmered into action.
“Oracle, I was promoted today. I’m bound for travel, intrigue, and adventure!”
A sacred whisper from the gloom. “Travel is hazardous. Politics are risky.”
“Yes, Oracle, I know. Any diplomat must dare to live in harm’s way. The dangers are just as you warn me—but it’s the moral dilemmas that trouble my soul.”
“I listen,” prompted the Oracle, because they did a lot of listening, and not much else.
“You see, Oracle: I want to be a polished, perceptive man of the world. But what if I am betrayed by my own pride and ambition? Here in Barcelona, my conduct has been exemplary. But Lyon—that is a foreign utopia.”
The Oracles were all-wise—in their computational fashion. “Your heart rate is too fast. Your blood pressure is too high. Your bones need more calcium and magnesium.”
“Oracle, I don’t need riddles. Please, I need rules. Can’t you help me? I’m imploring enlightenment.”
Some moments of hissing starry noise, and a human voice slid from the Oracle’s mouth.
Baltasar’s late father had passed upward two years ago, with his soul scanned from his body, and beamed upward into the holy machineries. “Baltasar …”
“Father, I have news to make you proud. I’ve become an official Court Gentleman!”
Baltasar’s father had nothing to say about that achievement, though it had been his dearest wish while he was still alive.
“Father, I’m to be an ambassador, and travel!”
“Travel,” echoed his ghostly father, seizing on a human concept. The lofty souls of the dead were embracing the vast beauty of the universe, but they still retained earthly memories. “Boil all the water before you drink it. Never eat any raw fruit.”
Baltasar leaned into the gloom. “I’ll remember your good rules, sir.”
“No knife fights about your honor. No gambling, ever. Never trust any smiling rascal who offers to show you the sights. And keep your hands off those loose foreign girls.”
“Trust me to obey, father. But I have some deeper questions. So far, I’ve been a young man of good reputation. But politics are ugly, and power corrupts. So today, I stand at a crossroads of my life—I have to choose. I can obey the Duke of Barcelona and leave my home country, in his service—and go live in that foreign stew in Lyon. Or I could forsake the aesthetocracy. I could sail back home to Mallorca. I could live on the family farm, just as you did.”
The Oracle’s visage offered a stellar hiss, and for a moment Baltasar thought he’d lost his father’s guidance. Then came a low paternal voice like distant thunder: “Your family has never raised a coward! The coward dies a thousand times, while the man of honor dies but once, to rise to heaven!”
“Amen,” said Baltasar.
Baltasar departed the otherworldly church, a fantastic structure of many twisted spires and millions of polychrome tiles.
His valet Pancho waited on the steps, in his straw hat, blue-striped shirt, short pants, and stained sandals. Pancho was a Mallorcan sailor, once a servant of Baltasar’s father. He’d left with Baltasar for life in the big town.
Pancho knew the truth at a glance. “So, then, we go to Lyon.”
“It seems my heritage has made my moral choice for me,” said Baltasar. “But you, Pancho, you too face a choice. You can risk the adventure in France. Or you could stay here, safe in Spain, and mind the salt works.”
Pancho smiled briefly. “Well, those salt works were your father’s best works—because without salt, people perish. But you’ll never make old Pancho the boss. I’m not a fine fellow fit to give commands.”
“Very well, then. Together, we’ll see if that lovely city of Lyon is more beautiful than Barcelona.”
“Their fine folk are even prettier than our fine folk?” scoffed Pancho. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“How do we get to Lyon, Pancho?”
“I’ve sailed to Marseilles. There’s a road from there.”
“We might choose the land route over the Pyrenees,” said Baltasar. He’d been scheming for the noble post of an ambassador, so he’d quietly hand-copied old maps from the Duke’s Library and obtained a compass. “The great mountains are sublime. The romance of those peaks can transform a man’s soul.”
“Risk the storms in the mountains? Young master, I don’t mind you being so brave and good, but let’s never be stupid.”
Baltasar bid his fond farewell to the Barcelona utopia, that stone-walled port of forty thousand souls. He sailed for France in a long wooden sloop, laden with artistic trade-gifts.
Relations among the aesthetocracy were always like that: they concerned themselves with the expressive, the beautiful, the sublime, the noble contest of rarities, supreme exemplars of craft skill, unique feats of artistic expression, inspiring acts of humanist nobility, so forth, and so on.
This art crammed in his boat made him an ideal target for pirates. However, his crew themselves were Mediterranean pirates, so they knew all the tricks of maritime ambush.
Even in sunshine, with a decent breeze, the turbulent sea was always choppy, with occasional huge, rogue waves. Three times they sighted enemy sails—because in the wilderness of the high seas, everyone was presumably an enemy. Then Baltasar faced the threat of having his throat cut by corsairs without ever receiving the sacred unction of having his brain scanned, so that his soul could be uploaded into the heavens.
What a dark and dismal prospect that was: for a wretched sailor to die at sea, unshriven by the computers. A precious human mind and soul, lost forever to the cosmos, like some mere drowned animal.
Baltasar was so seasick, though, that he wouldn’t much mind dying.
When they docked on the dry land of France, he realized that travel had toughened him. He’d become a survivor. Whatever he made of life henceforth—that would be up to him.
Along the weaving highway to Lyon, the old French landscape was mostly vast ruin. Grottos of broken concrete submerged in dark forests centuries old. The ivied landscapes of fallen high-rises, all rookeries for bats and pigeons. Aggressive packs of pigs snarled and grunted. Sometimes there were cave bears.
Lyon was the biggest city in France, a famous metropolis fit to draw regular horse-cart parades of craftsmen and pilgrims. Lyon drew him along, too: Baltasar of Mallorca, nineteen years old, seeking his destiny. A gallant young Spanish gentleman—rather good-looking, people said—with his rough-and-ready servant, and their cartload of many bags of salt.
Lyon was the great rival of Barcelona. These two utopias had a grudging respect for one another’s cultural values, so they rather looked down on Valencia, Madrid, Marseille, Genoa, and other towns of less renown.
Charming Lyon was indeed utopian, but also a serpent’s garden. As a Balearic Islands lad, Baltasar might fulfill his duties like a gentleman. Or, he might be reckless, ill-counseled, and ill-mannered, a wastrel face-down in a gutter.
Lyon had many gutters. Lyon had running water, aqueducts, libraries, galleries, theaters, spectacular churches, utopian palaces. The city’s common people dwelt under the spacious roofs of Lyon’s many ancient factories, stadiums, and car parks. The city was cleverly adapted to modern conditions, with endless ropes, pulleys, buckets, torch sockets, stairs, and ladders, and endless clotheslines stretched in the sun.
Shelter was plentiful and the city’s bread was free, thanks to the noble aesthetic-economic policies of the learned and cultured Duke of Lyon.
Baltasar’s first official act as ambassador was to go to confession in the magnificent Lyon Cathedral. He had himself scanned, whereupon the Oracle told him that he’d cracked a rib and caught hookworms on his journey.
He then presented his papers to the Archbishop of Lyon.
This seasoned clerical gentleman—Baltasar’s first ally—was the uncle of the Duke of Barcelona. So he was Spanish by birth, but he’d become a high-ranked Church official in France.
The Archbishop addressed him in English (which was the dead language best suited to computers). To his own chagrin, Baltasar knew only a few choice phrases in that noble language of the Church. So, the Archbishop—clearly disappointed—condescended to speak to Baltasar in everyday Barcelona Spanglish.
The wise Archbishop never meddled in partisan politics. However, he understood them. So he explained them.
Within living memory, there had been a climate disaster in Spain. A parching drought had struck, and cruel sandstorms from the many deserts of Spain had overwhelmed Barcelona. So the populace had fled, escaping into the Occitan territory of the Duke of Lyon.
Leo, Duke of Lyon, had been the soul of gallant courtesy during this crisis. He’d distributed bread and soup, and cleared new shelters in the slums, visited the sick who were coughing blood from the Spanish sand-dust—everything that honor might require.
In short, through his magnanimous nobility, he had put Barcelona deep into his moral debt.
The sheer trauma of this condescension—this humiliating boon of noblesse oblige from a powerful friend-enemy—was the painful basis of modern Lyon-Barcelona bilateral relations.
Like olive oil with vinegar, gratitude did not well mingle with pride.
“Your Worship,” said Baltasar, “I’m grateful for your briefing, but I have to ask: bad weather can ruin any city, isn’t that so? Someday, disaster will surely smite Lyon, and then Barcelona could offer the noble help. That would be honorable. Our two utopias would be like two beautiful sister cities—two pretty girls arm in arm.”
“If that was the case, then you’d have no job,” said the Archbishop. “Yes, the river floods could harm Lyon, but if so, then the current Duke would seek help from Geneva, or Turin, in order to keep Barcelona placed in the subordinate position.”
“I see.”
“He wants Barcelona’s Duke to be always the favor-seeker.”
It wasn’t news to Baltasar that the French were snobs.
With an effort of will, Baltasar repressed his tingling resentment, which was worthy of a young Spaniard, but improper for an ambassador. He spoke with cold composure. “I will certainly need discretion and tact for my new duties. Your Worship, I implore you to instruct me in the difficult art of pleasing the great and the good.”
The Archbishop smiled at this courtly statement. “Well said, your Excellency, Monsieur Ambassador. Your task won’t be easy. You must be here about that recent scandal with the gold.”
“Yes, I am. What went wrong there? Gold is such a beautiful metal. I don’t understand this quarrel.”
“That golden gift—from Duke Leo to Duke Carlos—that was not gold from this Earth. Computers mined that gold from asteroids, and they sent that gold here to Lyon as a sign of the favor of the heavens.”
“Is that rumor true? The Oracles sent resources, gold from outer space? And to the French, of all people?”
“That great lump of gold consigned to Barcelona, that wasn’t even a tenth of the gold that rained on France. Here in the Lyon utopia, they’re making their chamber pots out of gold. France finds divine favor in our year 561.”
