Near + Far (45 page)

"It's a fine morning," Belinda said to the table, watching the wood grain melt and puddle. And then she turned and left without looking at him, because she didn't see him anymore and only a tickle of memory remained.

Afternotes

I read this story at the Wayward Coffeehouse here in Seattle with my mother in the audience. There's nothing like your mother's face in the border of your vision to make you notice words like "fuck" and "nipple" in a story. Afterwards—and this is one of the many reasons I love her so—all she said was, "That was a great story."

It originally appeared in
Clockwork Phoenix III
, edited by Mike Allen. It is in many ways an uncharacteristic story, but one that was a lot of fun to write, despite the seriousness of the theme, which is addiction and relationships. The names for the characters came to me early, as did the very first passage, and it set the tone for the rest of the story. The original title was "Sexual Surrogates."

O
ver the years, Tikka's job as a Minor Propagandist for the planet Porcelain's Bureau of Tourism had shaped her way of thinking. She dealt primarily in quintets of attractions, lists of five which were distributed through the Bureau's publications and information dollops: Five Major China Factories Where the Population of Porcelain Can Be Seen Being Created; Five Views of Porcelain's Clay Fields; Five Restaurants Serving Native Cuisine at Its Most Natural.

Today she was composing Five Signs of Spring in Eletak, her native city.

Here along the waterfront, she added chimmerees to her list as she watched the native creatures, cross between fish and flower, surface. Each chimmeree spreading its white petals as it rose, white clusters holding amber centers, tendrils of golden thread sending their scent into the air along with the most delicate whisper of sound, barely audible over the lapping of the water.

The urge towards love beat along every energy vein of her silica body, even down to her missing toes, but she resisted it. She would remain alone this spring, as she had every spring since she had made her vow and inscribed it in the notebook where she kept her personal lists, under "Life Resolutions," 4th under "Keep myself clean in thought and mind," "Devote myself to promoting Porcelain's tourism," and "Fall in love." The third item had been crossed off at the same time, in vehement black pen strokes.

Her first sign of spring had been the singing of the tree frogs, which had awoken her three nights ago, in the small hours when most of the citizens cracked, gave way to despair, and crumbled in the manner of the elderly.

She was afraid of cracking, examined herself with obsessive care in the sluice for any sign that her surface was giving in, allowing the forces of time to work at her. She'd lain awake in the darkness, checking her mind with the same care. Were there any sorrows, any passions that might lead her thoughts along the same groove till it gave, eroded into madness?

She knew of one, and she kept her thoughts away from it as though it were made of thorns. Pain surrounded its edges and she could not avoid brushing against them even as she avoided it, but she kept herself from touching its tender heart, when silica melted in emotion and loss. She clicked her eyelids shut and contemplated what the morning would bring: ablutions and prayers, and a walk to the stop where the balloon-tram would take her to work. The sides would be hung with flower-colored silks in honor of the season. That would be her second sign of spring.

At work, there was jostling going on over a corner, windowed office. A writer had given way to cracking, premature, as sometimes happened with those who lived carelessly. Tikka was keeping back; she liked to do her work outside, and didn't think herself enough in the offices to merit such a coveted space. Not that she would have been first in line for it; of the three Minor Propagandists, she was the most junior, with only six years to the others' respective ten and fifteen.

Attle met her with a list in hand.

"Not again," Tikka said. "I like doing my own, you know that."

Attle shrugged. She was tall and willowy to Tikka's squatter lines. "He says they're only suggestions."

Tikka took the list and studied it. "Suggestions that are heavily encouraged," she said. "If I don't take at least half of them, it'll affect my next review."

"No one really worries about reviews," Attle said. It was true; the small Bureau's turnover rate was glacial. Like most government jobs, it was steady and guaranteed work in a place where poverty was rampant.

"I do," Tikka retorted. She was all too conscious that she didn't resemble most of the other citizens in the office. She had won her post through a scholarship, was one of the tokens allowed positions so they could be held up to the lesser advantaged as what they could be if they kept their mouths shut and worked hard.

More tourists meant more money for everyone, even if it did have to trickle through the layer of upper citizens at first. She didn't think many of the topics were designed to attract tourists.

"'Five spots celebrated in the works of the poet Xochiti'? Who reads him? We need things that tourists are looking for, new experiences and new trinkets to buy. Five places where they serve fin in the manner of the Brutists is not going to do it."

"He believes in niches," Attle murmured in habitual response.

"Some niches are so small that no tourist would fit in them!" Tikka waved Attle off when she would have spoken again. "I know, I know, it's none of your doing."

She went to her desk, situated in a paper-walled cubicle. The patterns were from several years ago; the department's budget had been shrinking of late and even the plants that hung here and there were desiccated but unreplaced, delicate arrangements of withered ferns draped with dust that no one wanted to touch, lest they be mistaken for a lower-class servitor of the kind the Bureau could no longer afford.

Her fingers danced across the transparent surface of her data-pad, which dimpled beneath her touch. She pulled up a master document and transferred the least objectionable of the Master Propagandist's "suggestions" into it, scoffing under her breath.

A clink of drummed fingers behind her snatched her attention. She turned so quickly she nearly collided with the author of the suggestions himself. "Sir!" She stepped back to a safer, more polite distance.

"Am I to believe you feel you have worthier candidates for your time than those I have advanced?" he said. Master Propagandist Blikik was made of smooth white clay, a material so fine that it gleamed under the office lights in a way Tikka's coarser, low-class surface could never match, even with disguising cosmetics. His colors would never fade, while hers would eventually succumb to the sun, give way to pale, unfashionable hues.

She dropped her gaze to the felted carpet beneath his feet. "No, sir."

He waited.

"I'm sorry, sir." She met his eyes. "I thought perhaps we might consider some alternative ways of attracting tourists."

Clatter of halted movement behind her as others stopped to listen. She could feel the shockwave reverberate through the office as whispers of her boldness were hissed to outliers who hadn't heard.

Blikik's robes, swirled with gold and crimson, a style as outdated as the cubicle walls, rustled as indignation drew him upwards, made him tower over Tikka.

"You will do as you are told," he barked, so crisp his teeth snapped together with an unpleasant, brittle sound. "You are not paid to think. If you wish to think, other accommodations can be made for your employment. Is that what you wish?"

"No, sir, not at all, sir," she rushed to supply into the shocked void his words had left.

He nodded once, turned on his heel, and walked away.

After she'd drafted a couple of lists, Tikka escaped outside to the terraced gardens overlooking the sound garden (one of Eletak's five most impressive sites). Its massive steel structures were strung with cabling and wire that sang whenever the wind stopped sweeping across the water and came to investigate the inland. Shapes huddled on the sculptures, the winged monkeys that made them their nesting grounds, where they raised their thumb-sized offspring and lived the lives of one of Eletak's five most distinctive native species.

The air smelled of monkey shit, which, combined with the unpleasant sensation of the vibrations from the sound garden, drove most visitors away. Rumor held that the sound garden could set off interior echoes that might leave someone dust on a pathway, but she had never believed it. Childhood prittle prattle, don't do this or that or you'll fall afoul of unseen forces. Meaningless superstition.

She leaned on the wooden railing, using her jacket to cushion her arms. The wires sang a song she'd heard years ago,
love love careless love
.

She could give way to it. She could go find a mate and the two of them could pose, take on the shape of love and freeze together in the most intimate contortion. She hated the helpless feeling afterward, where you were caught still mingled with the other person until the rigidity that came with orgasm, lasting hours, seeped away and you were your own unique person, rather than part of the larger construction, again.

How freakish, the ways of love on this planet, or anywhere else. The illusion that you had become something other than you were. The illusion that you could be something other than alone.

She would not succumb.

Love, love careless love,
the wires complained. It was unseasonably cold. Two monkeys huddled together for warmth in a metal Y only a few feet down from her. Pathetic.

She would not love again.

Too many memories were in the way.

It had happened the second spring that she had been working for the Bureau. She had traveled a lot the first year, taking pictures and conducting interviews of tourists in various areas to find out what had brought them there. She had written a private list: Five Things Tourists Dislike about Porcelain.

#1: The standoffish nature of its people.

#2: The unabashed attitude of greed towards tourist money.

#3: The slowness of the balloon transit center.

#4: The number of political uprisings.

#5: The number of native species prone to throwing shit at tourists.

The man had been trying to clean monkey shit off himself near the sound garden. She'd intervened, led him to a public sluice.

"No wonder all your people seem so clean," he'd said, washing himself off in the stream of heated water.

"Down here," she said. She didn't know why she said it. It was forbidden to speak to tourists with anything other than pleasantries. She'd had to go through weeks of training to do it.

"Other areas don't have these?" he said.

"Other areas don't have running water," she said. "Why waste technology on lesser clay?"

A monkey screamed behind him and he flinched. His eyes checked the badge on her chest. "You can deal with tourists, can't you? Not like most of these, forbidden to talk to us. Come and have lunch with me."

So few restaurants catered to both kinds, but she took him to a place near the Bureau, disks of aetheric energy which she slotted into her mouth, a salad for him, odd grainy lumps scattered through it.