Our readers are also welcome to send us their opinions and their wishes for what the magazine should offer in the future.

For Asia: Guy Hasson (Israel)

For Africa: Jonathan Elorm Dotse (Ghana)

For South America: Gustavo Bondoni (Argentina)

For North America: Ahmed A. Khan (Canada)

German sf writer and artist Christian Günther has created the following promotion flyer for our international science fiction reading in May in Second Life. Feel free to use this graphic to promote the event in the web. (But please send me a link if you do so.)

You know me on the boards as “Jim Crack,” but my real name is Peque.

I’m a basurero. A garbage collector in a small south-east Asian archipelago called the Philippines. You might better recall my country if you heard these words: Ferdinand Marcos and People Power.

I’m also a seroks; what’s known in the West as a dupe.

Where to start?

You know all about the jihad against the Great Satan, the archaic United States of America, which ended with the release of Iblis, a viral plague engineered to infect individuals with certain genetic markers, a plague that decimated the American population and left nine out of ten male survivors sterile.

In the bleak aftermath of Iblis, the moral and ethical concerns that had, up to that point, stunted the development of genetic engineering were conveniently forgotten and the advent of cloning came to pass.

Clones were used for any number of reasons, foremost among them, as changelings, made-to-order children to be adopted by the moneyed, yet childless. Almost overnight, cloning became big business worldwide.

But you already know all of this. What you may not know is how quickly the pirates descended on the ripe opportunity.

Asia has always been big on piracy. Decades ago, it was video and audio CDs (remember those?); today, it’s people. That’s what a dupe is: a pirated copy of a particular genetic sequence. A clone of a clone.

Naturally, certain modifications are made in the collectives in Chongqing and Hangzhou, where my kind are grown. From tinkering with melanin levels to darken skin color, to altering particular dispositions and personality quirks, the changes are made so we can adjust better to life in a Third World country (as opposed to a Western country, for which a dupe’s Template was undoubtedly made for).

As an example, I’m a seroks of an Oscar model (clones meant for the sprawling entertainment industry centered in New Hollywoodland), but instead of being passionate about Lynch or Cronenberg, I am in awe of everything Mike de Leon, a prominent Filipino director during the 1970’s and ‘80’s, made. He was responsible for one of the best horror movies ever made, anywhere, Itim.

However, what keeps me awake at night, cramped in my tiny nicho in a modular highrise in Tondo, is that the Philippines has no film industry to speak of. Not anymore. Not since the turn of the millennium and the downward economic spiral the country found itself in.

All that’s really left of the Philippines is a number of rich families—the ones who were always at the apex of the economic pyramid—and hordes of dupes.

Shortly after the third millennium began, the middle class finally succumbed to the black hole of poverty. And just like a black hole, no one outside the Schwarzschild radius which was the Philippines seemed to know what was happening. The Western media continued to obsess over the soap opera lives of the British Royal Family while thousands of Filipinos suddenly found themselves incapable of keeping pace with rising costs and fixed salaries.

The entire middle class collapsed, unable to resist the gravity of circumstance. At that point, the outcome became inevitable. The sprawling body of the urban poor achieved critical mass. The squatter situation, traditionally a perennial problem here, became untenable. And in any overcrowded, unplanned community, the sanitary conditions are nearly always the first to suffer.

Multitudes died from illnesses, exposure, starvation, while the government wrung its hands, then proceeded to reclaim vast tracts of land (once they’d managed to clear away all the rat-infested shanties filled with bloated, rotting and partially consumed bodies). In the end, the country’s economic pyramid was brutally truncated, reduced to an apex of the fortunate.

But if there is one thing history has proven, it’s that the rich have always needed other hands to dirty. Thus, the void in the population was filled (as it was in America) with clones. Or, in our case, with clones of clones.

In all honesty, we’re what keeps this country going. We wash their clothes, cook their food, clean their toilets, collect their garbage.

Up till now, life in the Philippines has been hard, but bearable.

Here, Mike de Leon’s entire filmography is downloadable, for free, as opposed to the latest from Hollywoodland, which can cost an entire month’s wages for me to see. I can watch Bayaning 3rd World or AKO Batch ’81 anytime, watch them over and over till I hemorrhage on social commentary, but at the same time, it’s like what I imagine old-time movie houses must have been like: sitting in the cold dark of the uppermost reaches of a balcony, right below the projection room, watching the flickering images on the screen, seeing the beam of light, knowing you can try to reach up and touch it, but also knowing your fingers will close on nothing but air.

It’s cruel, the genetic hand I’ve been dealt. I make movies in my head to keep myself sane, tell myself stories of balut vendors and Japayukis, Metro Manila aides and tak-a-tak boys, let their morality plays comfort me in the darkness of my personal movie house.

I could, of course, program a film online using computer-generated actors (known in the industry as “thesps”), but that sort of key-time costs thousands of credits, and a basurero’s paycheck is hardly enough to put food on the table and keep the leaky roof over your head, both anachronisms, when one mostly eats freeze-dried noodles and lives in a nicho (one of thousands of cubicles in what Westerners refer to as “coffin hotels”).

The thing is, these stories… these mental movies, I think of them as my children, as legacies I might leave behind, once my mortality catches up with me. Dupes, of course, like their clone Templates, are engineered to be sterile.

Having no reproductive rights is bad enough, but having all these potential children inside my head, and not being able to give proper birth to them…

It’s agonizing.

Not only that. Can you imagine not being given the right to speak your own language?

Since English was long considered the most widely used language in the world (and with the virtual disappearance of the country’s lower class), the collectives saw no need to re-map the language centers of the brains of most of the dupes headed for the Philippines. The rich didn’t mind; they no longer had to trouble themselves with learning the “native tongue.”

Only about a quarter of the seroks population actually speak Filipino, so the mother tongue still survives, thus the rise of new colloquialisms like “seroks.” I taught myself Filipino a long time ago. I had to, to fully appreciate Mike de Leon’s work without the subtitles. I’ve tried to teach other dupes Filipino as well, but it’s hard going, since their brains are hardwired to think in English. Still, I try.

But this is just me, poor little well-read garbage man with a dream. Other dupes have it far worse.

Those dupes engineered for the flesh trade (pirated from the Meretrice and Ganymede models) have it particularly bad. Already finding themselves in a demeaning, dehumanizing occupation, seroks putas are literally expendable sex toys.

Do you ever wonder at the current boom in snuff films? So long as kinky foreigners into rough trade are willing to pay for the original cost of the dupe (cheap, at a seventh of the going price of a Template), they can do whatever they want to her (or him).

These days, even the defective dupes (whose genetic sequences were particularly problematic to copy, and thus end up with imperfections, like a predisposition towards cancer or actually being fertile) are being released on the market. Along Ermita, they’re called “chop-chops,” and they also ultimately serve the secondary market for spare organs and body parts.

The Chinese collectives have even begun to pirate custom Demimondaine models from Europe, who all have chromosomal booby-traps that ensure any second-generation copies will be horribly malformed. There are brothels and clubs in Chiba and Amsterdam and Bangkok that cater to a particular clientele, where Demimondaine dupes roam the rooms and halls, hobbling, shambling, or simply crawling, drooling from hare lips, hair falling out in clumps.

As I’ve said, it’s cruel. Cruel and inhumane. But some of us have learned to adapt. I have. I’ve learned to adapt (if not totally accept) my lot in life.

But things are about to become… more complicated.

It’s all over the news, China’s intention to annex the Philippines, and no one’s inclined to contest this move. (Japan might have, I suppose, if they hadn’t been so quick to assist post-Iblis America with “economic packages,” which basically purchased 60% of the former United States, now known as NeoNippon.)

What isn’t on the news is how lavishly schizophrenic the Chinese can be about us seroks; they engineer us, but they despise us. Dupes are purely for export. Any dupes found living on Chinese soil are summarily executed by the white-clad anti-piracy police, the Yihe Quan, the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” named after xenophobic extremists who murdered Chinese Christians during the Qing Dynasty.

Even the Chinoys (the Chinese-Filipinos) look down on dupes. Not a single seroks is employed in a Chinoy household. Their maids and drivers are made up exclusively of naturally-born Filipinos, the surviving remnants of the country’s lower class, who now get paid more than five times the monthly wages of a seroks, and shun my kind as if we were rabid dogs.

Naturally, we’re being told that there won’t be mass executions once China takes the Philippines into its fold; we dupes will merely be exported, to work in other countries, and that we should see this as a lucrative opportunity to make more credits.

But that’s a lie.

Displacement always brings its share of culture shock, and re-conditioning takes time and money (far more than the cost of engineering a dozen new dupes).

Do I really believe the new government is going to spend to have my love of Mike de Leon’s work changed to a respect for Wim Wenders, or a fanatical worship of Guillermo del Toro, should I even be lucky enough to find placement in Germany or Mexico? Of course not.

I may be a dreamer, but I’m not naïve.

Once the Chinese flag flies at Malacanang, and the Lupang Hinirang is replaced by the Chinese national anthem, I and my fellow dupes– kaming mga seroks– will all be obsolete. Obsolete, and, in the horrid tradition of a Steven Seagal movie, Marked For Death. (My sense of humor may be frayed, but it’s still largely intact.)

I need to leave this place, because soon, this country will be the death of me. I could end up the star of my own snuff film, except my death won’t involve sex. It won’t even be captured on shaky hand-held digital. It will be a quiet, nondescript death, the denouement to a quiet, nondescript life.

I suppose it’s cheap irony that the country that is about to become a source of so much misery for my kind, has a pointed absence of tragedy in its traditional drama. Largely due to Buddhist teaching, which instructs one to accept life and its myriad contradictions, not to struggle against it, its old stories had no concept of the “tragic hero,” what 19th century writer Herman Melville called the “mighty pageant creature.”

Even when the drama of the common people first began to emerge in China, the tragedy was in service of a political ideology and not the individual per se.

If this were a traditional Chinese drama, I wouldn’t exist.

Well, I may be the copy of a copy, but that doesn’t make me any less me. I have a life and I refuse to surrender it, even if it is quiet and nondescript, even if it is, in the eyes of some, a counterfeit existence.

I’m even willing to go so far as to leave my body behind, if that’s what it’s going to take. (Though I’m aware that the cost of the mapping process, as well as the fee for storage space of a downloaded personality, is a stratospheric amount of money, so my liberation will, in all probability, not take that form.)

I have heard of the rat lines, smuggling my kind off Philippine soil, towards New Guinea or Australia. I need to get in touch with someone, anyone, who can arrange for my safe departure from the Philippines.

This is not easy for me. Despite everything, I love this country; hard as life is here, it is the only life I’ve known and I’ve come to adapt. Soon though, staying here will be out of the question.

Already, I’ve heard whispers on the street, dupes disappearing in Cubao, Guadalupe, Ermita. There’s been talk of the Yihe Quan ghosting the dupe enclaves of the Port Area.

I know this message has gone on far too long, but I needed for you to know how desperate my situation—our situation—here, is.

There is no longer any place for my kind here, if ever there was at all.

I’ll be waiting for your reply, though I can’t wait long.

For the first (and perhaps last) time,

Peque

– End message –

Hu Han-min stares at the wafer-thin flatscreen. He stands, undecided. Is Peque too knowledgeable for a garbage man? Too eloquent?

He walks to the room’s east window, his white leather jumpsuit creaking softly with each step. The air is bathed in the garish light that streams in from the south window, which looks out onto the Street of the Vermillion Sparrow. He is pleased that the sound-proofing is complete, keeping out the noise of New Ch’ang-an’s busiest thoroughfare.

At the east window (which is his favorite, despite the fact that the west plays such a dominant role in his life; he is part of the Ministry of Justice, associated with Metal, one of the five classical Chinese elements and thus linked to the West), he looks out to the Yellow Sea.

Born some ten miles inland from here, he is again thankful that New Ch’ang-an was built on this spot, on the tip of the Shandong Peninsula, and that he, Hu Han-min, Captain of the Yihe Quan, was assigned to this coveted post.

Despite all the difficult work that is to come, he is at peace here, in the midst of all the seasons, in the Activity of the Earth, in the greatest city of Under-Heaven, “Long Security,” the capital of his beloved Chung-hua Jen-min Kung-ho-kuo.

He looks out at the calm waters, where an off-shore arcology is being raised, its skeletal ribbings like a bizarre skeleton of some fantastical, mythical creature —some chimera — floating on the sea.

Yes, he decides, the message will do.

So much is available on the net, after all; the accumulated wisdom of the ages, ready to be downloaded and read at one’s leisure. Even a garbage man has access to the net these days. Besides, there is an earnestness to Peque’s words, an honesty.

The message is perfect. It will lure the filthy collaborators out into the open, into the light; those idiot humans taken in by the dupes, by those devilish mannikins, fiendish homonculi vat-grown in the collectives.

Of course, it is not all a lie. Like all good stories, there is just enough truth to make the whole convincing, to make it real.

There is a Peque, though he is already five days dead. He was watching the Cabaret sequence of Batch ’81 on a flip-down eyescreen when Hu Han-min’s men found him seated on the breakwater of Manila Bay.

He resisted, but in the end, all that he knew was extracted from his mind, and Hu Han-min had the basis for the message. His message. The one he has just finished composing.

“Send,” he vocalizes. His computer beeps softly in reply.

Hu Han-min gazes out to sea, watching the arcology’s Klieg lights rake the night sky, like a tiger’s stealthy claws, shredding the darkness with the blinding white glow of truth.

Copyright © 2012 by David Hontiveros

David Hontiveros is a National Book Award-nominated and Palanca-winning writer, with three horror/dark fantasy novellas (under the Penumbra imprint) out in the market. His short fiction has appeared in such publications as Story Philippines, Philippine Graphic, and Chimera, while his articles and film reviews have been published in Philippine Graphic, the Manila Times, Mirror Magazine, and Manual. His homepage is at davidhontiveros.com

]]> http://nova-sf.de/internova/?feed=rss2&p=669 0 http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=665 http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=665#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:18:47 +0000 miwoleit http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=665 by Justin Isis

Received 10/7, posted by R. Alejandro Lee (ID.M76-345-8761). I’m at a loss on this one. Obv. can’t publish it, although claims were investigated. Filed it for the time being. My comments follow.

Mr. Wong,

In certain prior travels, chance conversations, the pages of obscure volumes, you will have occasionally sensed something, an illumination perhaps, of phenomena you had never consciously suspected but nevertheless knew to be true. Perhaps you felt as if you were recalling something glimpsed in a dream. You could not identify it, but an impression remained in your mind, troubling you with its familiarity. You were quick to dismiss it – how could you recognize something of which you had no recollection, something you could not define, something which, indeed, resisted definition? At a certain age one feels that the contours of the world, if not strictly circumscribed, are at least well-sketched; there remain to be discovered only shadings, details, corroborating evidence. Ours is not an age suited for revolutions.

I am of course speaking of my own experiences, not yours. In presuming that you share them, I may be asking too much. I set out these initial points not for their own sake, but because I realize I am entirely dependent on your willingness to entertain certain speculations which your background and training have taught you to dismiss. As this letter progresses, my reasoning will become clear. But for now, let me say that for you to take me at my word, you will have to accept a series of unorthodox propositions. I have chosen you over the editors of other publications because, as one of your regular readers for a number of years, I know of your willingness to put convention aside when it becomes an impediment.

There are a number of ways by which I could stress my credentials. I will spare you them. My background is well known; I would not be above saying that I have served the state to the best of my ability. I have no history of mental illness, criminal or subversive action. That this letter is some form of hoax, as you will doubtless assume, is, if not absurd, then at best implausible when considered in light of my record and character. And there is no motive. Why would I risk my reputation on an elaborate deception?

Enough of this. In my present state, whether I am believed or not means little. I do not write to convince so much as to warn. If I am successful, you will pass my warning on to the authorities. If I am not, then – perhaps – nothing will happen. The world as it is cannot collapse overnight. My experience, extraordinary as it is, is also unlikely. At present few are equipped to follow my path; the terrible discoveries I have made will necessarily remain obscure for some time yet, perhaps indefinitely. So, my warning is not one of imminent apocalypse or any such trite calamity. It is much worse than that. It addresses a condition not merely inherent in the future but one which has perhaps always existed.

I am being vague. I will have to start from the beginning. As you know, I am something of an antiquarian. Though alone for much of my life, I have never been lonely. The study of ancient history and the mechanisms devised in ages past has afforded me an endless source of wonder and enjoyment. From my fifteenth year when I discovered a disused metalytic conversion engine, it has been my obsession to catalogue the progress of the sciences in regulating and finally controlling the primitive atmosphere. From the earliest orbital telecommunications to the more streamlined refineries synthesizing our air, my principal interest has been the remarkable continuity linking the advances in our mastery of the environment. A compendium of my papers can be found in the university library; I am particularly proud of “Some Notes on Middle-Cambodian Weather Satellites” (Ref. JB74937485801-75).

Although primarily devoted to the study of automata, in order to place my subjects in context I have had to acquire a reasonable knowledge of natural history. As I assume your knowledge is comparable to my own, I will be brief. We know that as late as the twenty-seventh century, humanity had contact with pre-evolutionary life forms or ‘animals’. That term, ‘animal’, now means, depending on the context, ‘counterfeit’ or ‘unlikely’ in underworld slang, but this is a corruption – in tracing the etymology we can determine the original biological connotations (for more on this, see the work of Baker and Ndoro, particularly The Kingdom in Traces). Prior to at least the Third Entrenchment, an animal was, approximately speaking, any non-human, naturally occurring organism comprised of cells similar in structure to our own. The dim memory of these monstrous beings now persists only in children’s tales and ever-dimming myths. My grandfather, for example, related stories of the ‘pig’, a kind of demon subsisting on filth. This entity was said to possess an ovoid body, a flattened, elongated nose, and rounded metal feet. More spectacular was the ‘elephant’ – so unlikely in its construction that I won’t strain credulity by recalling it.

Whether these half-remembered childhood terrors have any resemblance to historical reality is impossible to determine. Still, it might be said that something in their outline corresponds to fact. We know that, before the advent of a synchronized, worldwide standard of living, human existence was often random and brutal. Starvation, war and death were not abstractions as we think of them, but were, for many, daily expectations. Similarly, as difficult as it might be to imagine, co-existence with pre-evolutionary animals was once a reality of human life. The psychological state engendered by regular proximity to these monstrosities is difficult to fathom – certainly it might account for much of the barbarity and chaos characteristic of the period. In our nightmares we are sometimes troubled by strange shapes or outlines that suggest corruptions of our own form. The divergent nature of these phantasies accounts for their horror – how could we be safe, we think, from something that isn’t human? How much worse it must have been for our ancestors, confronted in waking hours with those obscene incarnations rearing forth from blind antiquity: the pig, the elephant, the nameless, numberless shapes.

With little time left, let me marvel for only a moment that our harmonious world could have arisen out of such a furnace. This is, of course, a tribute to the order of nature, the efficiency with which our universe and our God have suited us to our surroundings. The present age, in which our nutrition systems allow us to live as long as we wish, in which none can remember a large-scale war, shows well the perfection of our potentials. It is understandable, then, that the atrocities of the past, if not entirely forgotten, have at least grown remote from public consciousness. The Reform Fifth-Branch Shia, the Vortex Church of Universal Life, the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, and other ecclesiastical authorities have ruled that excessive interest in such matters is unwholesome; and while not quite law, their pronouncements have at least penetrated popular opinion. The resulting obscurity extends to my conjectures on retrograde biology. Direct photographic material is scarce; it persists mostly in private collections; the museums will have little to do with it. I was once shown – I will not specify by whom – a framed plate depicting the edge of a large veranda at dusk. A child is seated in a chair, holding a small creature, its body covered in short, thickened hair. At its posterior end, corresponding perhaps to the base of the human spine, a long, curling, whiplike appendage wavers past the edge of the armrest. The creature’s face resists description – attributing human characteristics to it would be not only obscene but misleading – but the nearest I can venture is that it has a kind of cunning cast. Its unnaturally luminous eyes fairly slash through the frame; two pointed satellites, perhaps analogous to ears, sit atop its roughly triangular head. As for the child, her face appears neutral, even sleepy. Since it is no longer reasonable to assume that the mental condition of our ancestors resembled our own, we can only speculate what purpose exposure of the girl to the creature served – and it is not a speculation I care to make.

None of these unsavory matters were on my mind when I received the letter from Goldstein. I kept irregular contact with my old friend, so that an unexpected message from him was always a welcome surprise. Goldstein’s interests intersected with my own at several points, although his area of specialisation was more theoretical. Still, we shared a love of obsolete curiosities. The burden of his letter was that a discarded Taiwanese media transmitter had crashed in one of the outlying sectors bordering the reclamation area in H7 (coordinates 42° 48′ 45″ N 70° 52′ 40″ W). I had been aware of the transmitter’s decaying orbit for some time, but had forgotten it in a rush of other matters. At least two-hundred years old, this relic of Prentiss-era neural broadcasting contained a number of interesting features. The central workup was unremarkable, but the inversion terminals were boron-coated, a pecularity of the time. Neither Goldstein nor I seriously expected it to survive re-entry, but there was always the chance of salvaging some notable fragment. Since his commitments would keep him occupied until the fifth, he suggested I make the expedition myself.

Setting out on this amateur reclamation mission, I was careful not to take it too seriously. I viewed it as little more than a lark, and proceeded accordingly, barely carrying enough provisions for the terrain in question. I had enough condensed water tablets with me to last a few weeks, but my instruments were limited to the contents of a small valise: a map, a scanner, some disassembly tools, several biological sensors. I began at dawn, heading to the H3 entrance vicinity by train.

With my present knowledge, it seems extraordinary to reflect on my mindset at the time. In retrospect it is easy to see it as one of complete naivety – but I imagine it differed little from any of the thousands of minds riding the same train or crossing the thoroughfares on a given day. The associations these features called up at the time are markedly different from what they produce in me now: I took them for granted then, but now they give rise to a kind of desperate nostalgia. How often do we notice how perfectly fitted we are to the world, and how perfectly fitted it is to us? The size of our rooms accommodates us; the design of our cities allows precise navigation. In everything, the proportions of our bodies and the nature of our constitutions determine how we have fashioned the world. But imagine the discomfort that would result from entering a building in which the proportions of the walls, the height of the ceiling and the length of the steps had been calibrated to some form other than our own – if, for example, we were forced to crawl through the frame of a miniature door. Although it is absurd that a door of this kind should exist, we can imagine the feeling of disquiet it might produce.

But I was not yet intimately familiar with this kind of dislocation as I left the city at the H6 border; neither did I receive any premonition of it. Although – awakened by an attendant after the long train journey – I was already in a state of susceptibility. As I looked out the window, I saw that dusk had overtaken the landscape. The train had stopped in an industrial area, one so heavily automated that for hundreds of miles only a single light could be seen to mark each way station. The landscape, though, reassured me with its regularity: row after row of identical units, their ranks dwindling to pinpricks in the distance. Neither did the obvious isolation trouble me – I knew that I would be accompanied always by the invisible motions of the factories, the minutely calibrated processes of their internal networks humming in the night like the pulses of a great nervous system. Perhaps a child in the womb experiences a similar sensation at the distant beating of its mother’s heart.

At the gate I produced my credentials and was allowed to pass through to street level. Consulting my electric map, I was able to orientate myself in the direction of H7. As I stepped onto the pavement, I felt the ground-heaters warming my feet. At first the only light was that of the stars, but soon the overhead lamps illuminated the path between the factories. At one point I was assisted by a metal trolley meant for maintenance workers that wheeled itself out of a storage shed and allowed me to type in my coordinates. It carried me for a few miles before returning to its station point. From then on I walked alone, holding the glowing circle of my map before me. Eventually I came to the end of the overhead lamps, although I was not in darkness – the factories themselves provided a steady illumination. If I walked near them, a segment of wall would light up with bright advertisements. I felt a certain tenderness at the displays of these buildings, as if their live-streaming commercials were an attempt to comfort me. Though I was alone in the night, the enormous faces of actresses and singers observed my progress from the monitors as they advised me on the latest sales. Even in this district, days away from any residential area, I could hear the familiar humming of electricity.

I stopped to rest for the night in the shade of a warehouse. Placing my valise on the ground, I took out the hand-sized square of a condensed blanket and unfolded it before lying down. Feeling the weight of my body, the ground-heaters doubled their output to keep me warm through the night. When I awoke they were still functioning. I tapped the ground to make them reduce their output, then slept for another hour or two. Finally rising around nine, I slung the valise over my shoulder and resumed the walk. After a few hours I came to the area I now suppose to be the junction between H6 and I5. At the time I thought I was detouring through I6, an impression my map seemed to confirm; but studying it now, it seems impossible in light of my later orientation. I did not immediately notice anything was wrong. The structural uniformity of the district meant that it was impossible for me to navigate by sight; a total reliance on my map was the only means of reaching my destination. At some point, though, I must have missed the correct detour. The map’s global positioning system had warned me before that a direct pedestrian route to the specified coordinates in H7 did not exist, as their proximity to the reclamation area meant they were almost certainly never visited for any purpose other than maintenance and mineral collection. Conceivably, it had been years since the area had known any human presence. The maintenance shuttles in the I6 central district, though, were installed with human travel capsules that could take me to the H7 edge of the reclamation zone.

But the region I found myself in, after several more hours’ walk, contained none of the terminal buildings I expected to find. For some time I had been descending a series of staircases, but as I came to an open vista at the foot of a central tower, I realized the extent to which the landscape had begun to slope downwards. Now I could see the full expanse of the horizon, a kind of featureless metal plain. I took this to be the edge of the reclamation area, but I must admit now that it was far too sprawling, too disorganized to be anything of the sort. There were no true buildings, only countless copper spires, perhaps broadcasting towers, situated a block or two from each other. Here the streets narrowed to mere shafts, to the extent that I had to walk on a kind of upraised ledge, nearly losing my balance. Now and then I heard a faint whistling.

At this point I should have turned back, or at least more assiduously consulted the map to determine my actual coordinate position. The matter of the media transmitter was too trivial for me to risk becoming seriously lost, but in such situations a perverse persistence is often born of frustration. I became determined to locate the impact site, more for my own satisfaction than any real hope of recovering fragments of the satellite. If I returned now, I reasoned, I would have considerably inconvenienced myself for nothing and I would have to report my failure to Goldstein. Perhaps I was also driven by a vague sense of awe as the landscape unfolded. I had never ventured this far along the H axis, and as I passed beyond the spires to a region of even more complete disorder, I felt as if I were leaving behind every vestige of the city. I had realized by now that this could not be the reclamation area, as the discarded components lying in heaps had clearly been scattered at random. It seemed as if no maintenance drones came this far either, as most of the piles were covered in rust. I felt a brief sadness at the sight of these disused machines; that they had not been recycled seemed a gross waste.

Silence came gradually, in a series of gradations. At first the whistling stopped; then I could no longer hear the hum of the ground-heaters. As I advanced over the course of an hour, I began to notice the emptiness of the air. Perhaps this strikes you as a fatuous description. But think for a moment, as you step from your apartment, of the pleasant hum of the air filters, the calm tones of the auto-bulletins relating the morning news. Then, as you leave the building, countless sounds rush out to greet you. These voices, advertisements, public announcements – the sounds I am hearing now, as I type this – are for me inextricably associated with human life, so that their gradual absence gave me the feeling of entering an unpleasant dream.

To keep myself occupied as I walked, I began to adjust one of the biological sensors. After removing it from its case in my valise, I set it to general survey. Convinced as I was of my isolation, I at first took the green blur expanding at the edge of the screen to be an error reading. It occupied, roughly, the northern edge of I5. Further inspection yielded no definite identification number, and a reference check categorized it as “unidentified organic matter.”

You will ask whether I diverted my course on purpose. To this I have no answer, except to say that a mixture of pride and curiosity led me in the direction of the green blur. I had realized by now that I was moving further and further away from H7 and did not relish the idea of retracing my steps. It was much easier to continue forward, and hope that I could somehow catch a train back to H3. That and a desperate need to justify the time expenditure meant that the novelty of the error reading demanded investigation. I told myself that I would eventually come across a station if I continued north; perhaps the “unidentified organic matter” (an obvious non-sequitur, since organic matter is by definition human and thus readily identifiable) signified a synthetic power source or some other manufactured bioform, which would indicate an area of frequent transit. My sensor was somewhat outdated, and it was probable that it had detected a recent kind of synth-cell or conversion platform whose identification number was not yet noted in its registry. That I was able to convince myself of the veracity of these moronic suppositions now seems unbelievable. If through some divine agency I could be given back even a moment of that time, I would run without stopping away from that awful green stain, which is now inseparable in my thoughts from the formless terror which besets us in nightmares.

I had by now come to terrain that required me to climb down a series of ladders to proceed. As I descended to regions of even greater isolation strange smells and other sensations came to me. I could hear a faint whistling again, but now it seemed distant and hollow. The walls I climbed down and the ground further below me took on the same hue and texture, until, finally reaching a remote plane, I saw a featureless horizon extending for miles – only the refined steel beneath my feet gave me some hold on certainty.

Activating my sensor again, I sent out a trace probe to the area of the green blur. After a few moments the probe returned with a cross-section analysis. My first reaction was astonishment. With my limited knowledge of cytology, I could make no definite statement on the nature of the retrieved traces. But they differed so greatly from everything I knew about the standard model of the cell that I could only take them to be an advanced and highly specialized experimental model. They resembled our own cells in certain regards, except that they were surrounded – perhaps insulated – by a wall-like layer of proteins and polysaccharides, in addition to being outfitted with a number of ineffable organelles, the most conspicuous of which resembled large swollen membranes. The ingenuity with which these cells had been constructed seemed scarcely human, although I was able to convince myself they most likely functioned as energy conversion units in some of the newer facilities.

I rested for a few hours, then proceeded towards the horizon. The unfiltered air became colder, and the absence of any visible frame of reference made me doubt whether the structures I had imagined truly existed this far from any inhabited sectors. Examined now, my mindset seems scarcely reasonable, and I can recall nothing of my thoughts as I proceeded, mile after mile, towards something I neither understood nor desired. I suppose that I entered a dream or trance state. I felt as if I had no thoughts at all and only advanced with a kind of mindless or mechanical rhythm.

I don’t know how long it was before I reached the wall. I must have noticed its presence miles before I reached the base, since even at close range it towered to the sky. Enveloped in its shadow, I experienced it first as a monstrous presence overtaking the landscape, the single solid fixture in that bare metal desert.

But it was not that the wall presented any kind of stability. Its very raggedness, its patchwork construction, the snares of wire protruding from its crags – all these presented me with a terrible impression of age and decay. Whoever built that wall had obviously abandoned it, had forgotten the border it meant to mark. I checked my sensor and found that I was less than several yards from the green blur.

You will have surmised from my earlier speculations that whatever awaited me beyond the tangle of wires and concrete rubble was something out of time – an animal, perhaps a horde of them, massed and ravenous. And while the reality was both more unlikely and more terrible, at the time I expected – nothing. My mind had reached a point of perfect stillness and exhaustion. Clambering through the wall, pushing aside the crumbling masonry, I felt that I would find myself in a different section of a dream – transported back to my childhood, perhaps, or some unknown landscape of the future.

Instead my first footsteps landed on a patch of softness, a stretch of turf that sank slightly under pressure. I realized that I must have overstepped the edges of the precision-textured paving, and that the brownish, crumbling floor was actually a thick layer of soil. This contact with the naked earth troubled me. I suppose the workers and patrolmen at the edges of our cities have the occasional experience with it, but it was the first time in my life that I had walked on an unsculpted surface. My first steps were tentative. I expected the ground to split open and give way, or else swallow me completely. I can imagine the contaminating microorganisms I would have seen if I had thought to check my sensor more closely. Although I was wearing regulation antibacterial clothing, I still think of the invisible forces that must have swarmed over me…

I feel a great despair at the prospect of describing the landscape itself. Rather than provide any specific portrait, any measurements of its slopes and inclines, I will describe it only as a vast irregularity. By this I mean something quite different from the planned asymmetries of our experimental buildings and sculptures. Despite their surface impression of the random, we can find in the latter angles which have been judiciously selected, textures chosen for their visual effect, some hidden sense of plan. But the arrangement of the earth was of an entirely different order. It had not been filigreed or finished, sculpted or sterilized. It had not been precision-textured or mass-molded. It existed as I suppose a cancer must exist, in a state of mindless and malign expansion. I felt that I had come to the end of the world and was glimpsing a region that had taken shape out of sight for millennia, forming its terrain according to the caprices of the void.

Each breath I took seemed difficult or somehow too rich, as if the air had thickened to slime. Mixed in it were a thousand unknown odors, all of them telling of ancient and nameless things…looking down again, I saw that a green carpet had spread across the ground like the film of rot that forms on a corpse. Further on, a dark green patch of matter stood out against the dim skyline, its protrusions wavering in the wind. As I moved closer, a series of crimson bulbs appeared on its surface, swaying slightly at the ends of barbed green stalks. Before I realized what I was doing, I had moved forward and taken one in my hand. My initial impression of it had been mistaken; now I realized that the strange involutions of its surface formed a kind of pattern. Holding it, I felt an alien terror at the juxtaposition of this order within disorder. I let go and saw that one of the barbs had pricked my thumb. A drop of blood had formed, the same crimson color as the bulbs themselves.

Maybe it was this image of my blood staining the green barb that led me to realize the nature of the landscape – or perhaps it was only the swaying of those green stalks and the involutions at the heart of the bulbs. But whatever the trigger, I realized that the green mass before me was, in some sense, alive. I do not mean that it had anything in common with conventional life – as the cell traces will attest, even its barest foundations were divergent – but its capacity for growth mirrored our own.

Not that my frenzied thoughts approximated even the bare coherence of my current speculations. I however realized the truth at some instinctive level. Then, even as I feared what might result, I called out. But if the green mass heard me, it did not respond. I tried again and received the same result. Finally, I took a rock from the ground and, after moving to a safer distance, hurled it at the green shape. I succeeded in striking one of the crimson bulbs and separating a section of it, although the rock sunk into the base mass without apparent effect. The mass itself gave no response. Thinking perhaps it was sleeping, I tried again, with the same result. If my persistence seems ill-advised, even suicidal, in the face of what I had encountered, I can only say that I had long since passed beyond the bounds of conventional reasoning. I had come to a place so alien that my responses were, I suppose, those of a child – that is to say, despite my growing fear and revulsion, I acted without awareness of the possible consequences.

After a few more attempts at communication, I realized that if the green mass possessed sense organs at all, they were attuned to some spectrum of experience utterly different from my own. The discovery did not reassure me. Here I was confronted with absolute insensibility; here was a form of living death. Here the linkage of life and mind was broken. These immobile creatures – for there were more of them, I saw, crowding the landscape all the way to the horizon – pertained to some degenerate cycle of evolution yet more regressive than even ‘animal’ life. The green mass and its curiously swaying bulbs had no compassion, no pity, no mind – nothing that we might think of as a soul. At once I was struck by the dreamless immobility of the green mass, its life-cycle progressing by silent, invisible degrees…

I thought then of certain obscure testaments and histories, in which are preserved the languages of dead civilizations and myths whose meaning has grown unknowable through dim centuries of neglect. Only in these apocryphal accounts, I decided, could I glean some understanding of what now confronted me. ‘Marigolds’, ‘poplars’, ‘the geranium’, ‘the willow’ – words like these resound like horrors from old books or the names of angels, meaningless and terrible. In resurrecting them now, I am undoubtedly distorting their original meanings and applying them improperly. But the general term I will use – vegetation – seems to best serve my purpose, in its evocation of obscure and immemorial horrors.

I turned away from the green mass and wandered further, towards the distant light on the horizon. That light – little more than a dim haze – cast a watery pall over the landscape, so that everything seemed to shimmer slightly. I headed towards it with a sense of trepidation. More than once I stumbled over the uneven terrain, and when I at last came to a steep rise bordered by a small river, I did not at first notice the shape that towered at its base. I recall that I dropped my valise, and after leaning over to retrieve its contents, I stood up sharply and found myself overshadowed by a darkly swaying shape…there, crowning the base of the incline, was a great yellow-green behemoth, a being whose outline resists sane description. I can recall only distorted and disparate impressions of it – simultaneous images of an enormous branching fiber-optic cable, the convolutions of a human nervous system, a densely woven net, and a frozen waterfall occur to me in retrospect, although in truth it had no recognizeable facets, nothing to link it to the continuity of known life. A central base column supported innumerable ramifying branches, all of them overhung with drooping greenish strands that waved in the wind as if reaching to devour. But its movement did not extend to the base – even as I looked there, I realized that the movement was only a product of the wind, and that the behemoth itself, if not prodded to motion by an outside force, would have remained as still as the greenish mass as I had seen before. It was this, perhaps more than the thing’s surface, that caused me to turn and run, to clamber down the slope and away from that mindless wavering, that insensate movement of the behemoth I now call willow.

I don’t know how long I ran. I must have made it past the wall and, somehow, climbed back to the outer sectors. I no longer have any memory of my transit, and cannot be certain of the route I took. Here my recollections break off entirely, and I must rely on the accounts of others. It seems that they found me somewhere at the border of H6, sprawled on the street unconscious. My valise had torn and its contents were gone. When roused, I mumbled in fragments for a few hours, then again lost consciousness. When I awoke in hospital, I was told that Goldstein had informed the police of my expedition, and that a team had been searching for me for hours. When I failed to contact Goldstein after the appointed time, he had attempted to call my phone directly. Receiving no response, he grew suspicious and sent for help.

As my old friend sat by my side, I thought to thank him, but I had difficulty forming the words. I was immediately questioned about my whereabouts, and whether I had succeeded in locating the media transmitter. This matter seemed so remote and inconsequential that it took me a moment to formulate any response at all. There was nowhere for me to begin – I couldn’t think of any existing words that could accurately describe what I had encountered, much less any framework in which to place them. I was left only with a series of incoherent impressions: a dim, watery light; a sharp crimson pain; a mindless wavering in the wind. My first thought – a temptation that still besets me – was to dismiss the entire experience as a hallucination resulting from prolonged fatigue. And this in fact was the conclusion reached by the investigators who questioned me at greater length following my recovery. I use the last word tentatively, as I have not in any sense recovered from what I saw. But I was eventually deemed fit to return home, and the formal inquiry was quickly shelved. I have appended its file number to this letter should it be needed as a reference, although I feel it is cursory and ultimately meaningless. At the time it was written, I had not yet been able to think clearly about my experiences, and so what I reported bears only a superficial similarity to what I have attempted to describe in this letter.

Since then I have secluded myself in the university library in order to research certain ancient texts, following the thread of the obscure intimations and remembrances that came to me during my long hours of convalescence. My findings have been scarce – little information survives about the old time, and I have had to infer much from certain names and references. ‘Eden’ is a term that appears in several texts, seeming to denote a kind of hell or depraved eon of the vegetation’s dominion. Other more obscure references – ‘efflorescence,’ ‘saprotroph,’ ‘the Amaranthus’ – mean little. And so my hypothesis, contrived from these fragments, is correspondingly vague and lacking in evidence. Nevertheless, it is my best attempt at explaining my experiences beyond the wall.

To begin, I will have you recall the moment immediately before I turned and fled that infected landscape. I had not recovered from my first sight of the willow when I looked at it a second time, noticing the insensible stillness of its base. Looking closer at that base column, I saw that it terminated in a system of thin, elongated claws that stretched through the ground itself.

‘Parasite’ is another word that I will have to define for you. Although no longer part of the common parlance, it is still occasionally used to refer to a dependent living past his means. But, as with ‘animal’, the term’s original meaning was quite different: a parasite was an animal that survived at the expense of another animal, by sucking its blood or nesting inside it. No doubt this perverse notion makes you recoil; I am sorry to have to mention it. I do so only to suggest an appropriate scale in which to measure the phenomena I have described. That is, I wish to suggest that the life forms I encountered were parasites of the entire planet.

There exists no analogue – if we imagine, for example, a man gnawing through a building, or a machine which consumes other machines, we have immediately entered the realm of dreams or nonsense. But I insist that the vegetation shared – no, I am afraid I must use the correct tense – shares with our world itself that very method of existence. I will refer you to one of the manuscripts recovered at the Reykjavik excavation site (Ref. JB38407435439-52), where it is written:

Fixed in the ground…[the vegetation] consumed water, earth and the light of the sun.

No doubt the last clause is intended metaphorically; we can read in the holy books, for example, of demons and malign angels, manifestations of a coalescent darkness which seems to erase or consume light. Perhaps such metaphors were the result of a pre-scientific cultures’ attempts at describing the vegetation; certainly that all-consuming virulence is conveyed more eloquently in this fragment than anything I could hope to write. ‘Water, earth, and the light of the sun’ – however it is to be read, this phrase echoes in my mind. I cannot imagine a more eloquent lamentation for the flesh of the world, infected forever with immortal monsters.

Leaping into pure speculation let me posit a distant past in which our ancestors arose amidst the chaos of a planet near-paralyzed with vegetation. Surely their hatred of these monstrous ‘poplars’ and ‘geraniums’ must have been so great that not only were the combined resources of nations massed against them, but any record of their existence was expunged. Having seen them, having felt the green carpet beneath my feet, it is not difficult to understand why. Even now the horrific specter of Eden torments me with its special nightmare of the undesigned. Now you must understand that atavistic terror – if there is a God, our priests and authorities reason, it must reside in the angles of our towers, in the grids of our cities, in the white fountains purling at their hearts…we have always imagined that this order corresponds to a higher, sacred order, one which predates us but which some part of us knew before our births. For us, to design is to know. We do not invent, merely uncover. The more that the world reflects the symmetry of our dreams, the more it resembles the eternal. And so it cannot be allowed that a different order of time has existed alongside our own, one long grown formless and depraved by sustaining in itself all the aberrations of a primitive Earth. Now you will understand – you must understand – the extent of the evil I have encountered.

I will finish here – the effort of writing is too much. I have not been the same since I returned from the outer sectors. My ability to concentrate has gone and I seem to drift in and out of sleep, the periods of lucidity alternating with strange trances and nightmares. Even the most familiar locations – my room, my desk, the halls of the complex – no longer seem connected to my memories of them. Instead they have taken on new and frightening associations. In their drawings, children often imprint mundane objects with the protean terror of their nightmares: murderous ovens lined with teeth, for example, or a great tower with spindly arms stretched to snatch them from the ground. A reflection of our own deaths seems to wait in the world, and the forms it takes are endless. Now that reflection has returned to me, making me tremble before the shapeless creatures crammed into every shadow. I am afraid to look at the walls – even there, patterns seem to be emerging: strange snaking shapes, obscure involutions, spirals folding in upon themselves…but mostly it is the memory of the awful willow and its thin, wavering limbs, appendagesg that seem to whisper to me the name of a hidden and malevolent god.

There is nothing else – you will decide who to contact and what to do with my papers. There is nothing more for me now – I feel only a vague unease.

Unaffiliated as I am with any official church, my last appeal will certainly ring false. It strikes me now as little more than an involuntary response, the twitching of a severed head. Yes, it will seem fatuous and desperate, but I will do it nonetheless. A prayer.

May God help us finish what our ancestors could not.

Sincerely,

Robert Alejandro Lee

Sub. of transcript to State dpt. Branch-3 resulted in following response [doc. #M73747463, excerpt]: 

[pg. 1] “…could not confirm Mr. Lee’s alleged travels to coordinates 42° 48′ 45″ N 70° 52′ 40″ W, particularly his claim to have penetrated a crumbling wall somewhere north of I-5. A routine maintenance check has revealed that no such breach as Mr. Lee describes exists anywhere in external sectors I-5(0) through I-5(360). The border regions Mr. Lee claims to have visited are at present patrolled by guardsmen, for reasons of public safety. Therefore Mr. Lee’s sojourn in the area could not have occurred at all.”

[pg. 3] “…the existence of ‘poplars’, ‘geraniums’, the terrifying ‘willow’ and other ‘vegetative’ matter cannot be reconciled with the counsel of any reputable scientific authority, and so must be dismissed as the fantasy of a disturbed and potentially psychotic mind. Mr. Lee’s disappearance following the reception of the letter would seem to corroborate the downward turn in his mental condition. Stratford (Ref. JB34937435439-72) has classified a belief in the existence of non-human organic life as ‘a classic warning sign of incipient psychosis.’”

-ed.

Copyright © 2012 by Justin Isis

Justin Isis is a model, fashion designer and science fiction writer who lives in Japan and has lived in America, Australia, Italy, and various other countries. His last book was I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, and his next book is Welcome to the Arms Race. He is interested in music, ice cream, and Situationism.

When Gabriel returned from his voyage there was little time left for him and the world. The thing that crossed the solar system on its course of irrevocable destruction was now less than two astronomical units away from Earth. For months a pattern of glowing red streaks had painted the heavens and the giant gravitational vortex that ripped Jupiter apart had been visible with the naked eye. The sky had returned to its soft vernal blue as in countless springs before and one could be tempted to think that there were as many years still to come.

As Gabriel, one of a handful of passengers in the two wagons of the only train that arrived this day, stepped on the platform, there was a crisp elevating peacefulness in the air. He tasted a salty savor on his tongue and imagined he could already hear the shallow surf of the Côte Sauvage that was only a few miles away. It was hard to believe that after all the marvelous and frightening spectacles that had marked the sky for years just the clear blue sky above him was the final indication that the world was about to end. The calm before the storm.

The other passengers went their various ways and within a minute Gabriel was alone. Little had changed. The old station of Le Croisic with the tin roofs above the tracks, the bare red brick walls and high dusty windows still looked as if it was designed to last for millennia to come. Gabriel put the little bag with the rest of his things on a bench, sat down and wondered what to do. He had not inquired before his return whether Shangri-La 2.0 still existed. He didn’t know if Martha still believed as much in what she did as she had believed four years ago. As he remembered her pleading eyes, her pale freckled face and her fiery red hair, an endless number of questions and doubts shot painfully through his head. He had been only twenty-two then, ten years younger than her, and he hadn’t been mature enough for a decision of that scope. He had seen so little of the world, and the time to compensate for all the experiences he would never make, for all the potentials of a life he would never have a chance to live, was running out. But still he wasn’t sure if he had set the right priorities, if there had been no other way than to leave Martha and the little community of Shangri-La 2.0 behind.

After a while he stood up, entered the station building and stepped out into bright sunlight. No-one was to be seen on the main street of the small village, behind the windows of the low crouched houses, on the pavements in front of the deserted shops and corner cafés. No cabs, buses or trams anymore. He found a bike leaning at a lamppost, but it was rusty and of no use. He would have to walk. The Shangri-La community had claimed a narrow stretch of land about five miles away, squeezed between a rocky hill and a shingle beach. He still remembered every step and turn of the way. It felt as if he had walked this way a million times. In the fifteen months that he had spent with them until the discovery of the wandering Black Hole had been confirmed, Martha and her people had left indelible imprints on his mind. During his journey he had become increasingly aware of how much they had changed him. And he had very soon started to miss her, determined that he would return when the end was near.

 ***

He had just met her and still felt as if he had known her for a life-time. When he had reached Shangri-La 2.0 and introduced himself to the steering committee, Martha had attended to him. They had set down at a coarse teak-wood table under the outstretched low-hanging twigs of an old willow, drunk wine from Shangri-La’s own vineyard and talked for hours. He had fallen in love with her almost at first sight. She smiled and laughed a lot, but there was something pained and melancholic in her face and her eyes were always slightly reddened as if she had just cried. Her voice, however, was straight and powerful. She had a strong will and intellect. She had a way of seizing him with words, peeling away his outward skin of coolness and pretensions and recognize the truth about him: that he had lost his way, that he was looking for a home and something worthwhile to do.

He still remembered every detail of their first day together.

“Tell me“, she had said. “What do you think Shringri-La 2.0 really is? Most people are under the impression that we’re kind of a latter-day hippie commune. You must have heard or read something that inspired you to come. So what did you expect?“

At this time he knew about Shangri-La 2.0 that it was one of several dozen micro-states founded in Europe in recent years, a new principle of social organization that had been imported from the USA in the late 2020′s and allowed small communities to realize their very own political and social ideas.

„Guess I was curious“, he said.

„What would you say if I’d tell you that we’re parasites? And rather schizophrenic ones at that. We draw on economic structures that we reject. Most of us work as freelancers for bio-tech or IT companies. Shangri-La is based on capital that we have earned from our political enemies. Dirty money.“

He had tried to respond with something smart but failed. During their whole conversation he repeatedly lost the thread of the conversation. He had watched her, had let his eyes wander about her slim lithe body, gripped by an overwhelming desire to touch her and more. She sensed it all. They had spent this night together and hundreds of nights after that.

When the news of the coming disaster had hit the world, and after the first shock had subsided, Shangri-La 2.0 had transformed itself into something completely new. Martha and Gabriel had first assumed that their community would collapse, and in fact many members had returned to their families and former homes. But those remaining had in their very own way faced the only questions left for humanity: What can you do with the rest of you life, knowing the exact date of your death? How can you live knowing that your final choices will be either to kill yourself or to experience horrors beyond imagination? That you will be slowly shredded into subatomic particles and that your home planet will be crumbled like a piece of dry earth? Is there any way to endure this and stay sane?

***

Near the coast the terrain rose and became bare and rocky. Tiny dust clouds swirled about the outcrops. The formerly lush meadows on the slopes had shrunk to small patches of dry yellowish weed. Gabriel tried to listen through the noise of the surf and could barely hear any birdsong. It was as if life was already retreating from the area.

He had no trouble climbing steeper stretches. His body had become much fitter , his legs and arms stronger during his travels. Although he felt that he had caught mere glimpses of the world out there, he had in fact crammed as much adventure and exploration into these four years as one possibly could. He had wandered lone pathways across the highest passes of the Himalayas. He had witnessed incredible auroras in the skies of the Far North. He had canoed through the deep-blue shoals of Pacific atolls. He had crossed the jungles of Papua New Guinea and visited remote villages where languages were spoken that no scholar had ever heard of.

But not just that – he had also experienced and, more than once, almost fallen victim to the million insanities of a species, the alleged summit of creation, that was simply not prepared to accept its end with peace and dignity. He had been in Delhi when the riots broke out after the hike of the food prices. He had been among the millions marching into the Australian outback when the coastal cities became uninhabitable. He had narrowly escaped massacres in refugee camps along the East African coast. And somehow he had even survived the hazardous boat ride across the Mediterranean Sea to return to Europe. But all this added up to nothing. The horror and the beauty he had witnessed in the world had annihilated each other, and he felt as clueless and as ignorant as before. He would get no chance to grow up in this world. He would leave it almost as incomplete as he had entered it.

The sun had sunken imperceptibly, the light had softened slightly as he reached the long crooked ridge that peaked in a spot from where he could overlook the whole of Shangri-La 2.0. He sat down on a rock to rest and looked up to the sky. The glaring orb that pierced his eyes filled him with a vague sense of hope. At least the sun would shine on for some billion years more. The Black Hole would probably not come close enough to tear off its atmosphere. It would only inject some energy and cause the sun to flare up with new power and light. Yes, there will actually be a brighter future when we are gone. The thought made him laugh.

But there was even more: Measures had been taken to rescue traces of the Earth and human life. Six months ago the last probe with data and biological samples had been sent into space. Maybe there would be a new start somewhere. Maybe humanity would get a second chance to build a wiser and more human world. Gabriel was convinced that, ultimately, nothing could die. There was no destruction in the universe, only transformation. Time would never stop. Existence would never cease. The cosmos continuously renewed itself, expanded and collapsed, exploded and was ripped apart and recreated from its own ashes. In some unforeseeable future, he thought, and in ways yet unimaginable I will live on, forever united with the woman I love.

But why am I so afraid? he wondered. Why did I have all those nightmares on my way back here? How can I still be such a coward? Nothing will happen. Nothing will die.

 ***

Shangri-La was an accumulation of some twenty flat, sand-colored buildings, distributed in an irregular pattern over a sparsely vegetated area of about a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Lawns, bushes and a few willows formed a small park in its center. Gleaming solar vehicles were parked along an encircling road. The main feature of the compound was the assembly hall, an oval-shaped building with a columned entrance and slim, light-admitting architecture. A similar structure was being built right beside it and most of the people Gabriel saw had gathered there. He noticed scaffolding and machines and was amazed that the work was still ongoing.

As he climbed down he remembered the lively atmosphere and the remarkable number of people who had worked and lived here in the heyday of Shangri-La 2.0, and the much quieter living after the disaster had been announced and half of the community had left. Things seemed to have further slowed down in the last four years. Gabriel saw only a handful of people between the buildings who appeared to be idle walkers, doing nothing in particular. Work at the building site seemed to progress in slow-motion, as if the vehicles that transported material and the cranes that lifted parts had days enough for each single task.

He paused several times and considered to turn back. But he didn’t know where else to go. Each step downward felt harder than the previous. It was long ago that his mind had played similar tricks with him. He had always felt so light and secure here. Nothing of this was left. A nagging thought suggested that he wouldn’t be welcome. Even worse: He wasn’t sure if he would welcome himself back here. As he stepped on the road at the bottom he forgot for a moment all that was behind him and all that may lie ahead. He thought only of Martha – how she may be today; what she may feel; what she may think of him.

Most of the dwelling houses he passed seemed to be uninhabited. Some guys and girls crossed his path, introverted and dismissive, and he didn’t recognize their faces. He saw from afar that Martha was among the small assembly at the building site. There was something about her that made her stand out even among a crowd of thousands. She talked to a tall, curly-haired man, pointed at something on the facade of the shell construction, and handed a pad computer over to him. Then she turned around and beckoned to somebody else. Suddenly she froze and Gabriel’s heart jumped.

He had expected hesitation and mixed feelings but there was only pure joy in her face as she became aware of him. She approached him with open arms and when he felt her pressing against his chest, everything he wanted to say was stuck in his throat, never to come out.

“I’ve expected you one of these days”, she said. “It may sound selfish, but I hoped you’d come a little earlier. Our scientists say that there are probably only…”

“Don’t tell me. I’ve stopped counting the days. I don’t want to know.”

“But the clock keeps on ticking. That’s annoying, isn’t it?”

“The clock keeps on ticking”, he said. “I hear it every second.”

She laughed, grabbed his hand and dragged him from under the dense foliage of the tree where he had stopped without noticing. She introduced him to some of her fellows but he forgot their names immediately and wasn’t sure if he’d met them before. A few minutes later they sat at the same table, on the same benches, and among the same crooked twigs where they – or rather she – had talked for so long on their very first day.

“I don’t understand”, Gabriel said and pointed toward the unfinished building. “Why do you… I mean, it will never be completed.”

“When did we ever know if anything here would be completed?” She leaned across the table and held his hands. “Anything could have happened. At any time. A flood might have come and destroyed everything. Who knows?”

“But you know now.”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s say it just keeps us busy. What should we do? Sit around and wail?”

“So you pretend that nothing…”

“No. We just take our time for things that we cherish. That’s what we decided at our last meeting. We don’t force things anymore. When we want to interrupt work and talk, then we talk. When we want to go for a walk and think, we do so. When we want to spend a lovely evening with each other, we postpone work the next day. You value even the simplest things much higher if you see life’s limitations.”

He inadvertently shook his head. “I have missed so much.”

She squeezed his hands. “You must have experienced a lot. Maybe I have missed much more.”

A hour later some of the others joined them for an earlier dinner. Gabriel ate little and understood almost nothing of what was spoken around him. He dreaded to look into Martha’s green, weary eyes that barely turned away from him. When the others left them one by one and he was alone with Martha in a mild, starlit night, his head spun from far too much wine. He knew he’d wanted to say something, that he had to express something important going on inside of him, but he’d forgotten what it was. When Martha held his hands again, he felt wetness on his cheeks and was surprised to note that he had started to cry.

“I wish I could…” It was as if the words had to force their way through a lump in his throat. “Four years ago when I decided to leave – wasn’t this terrible? I wondered all the time if you could forgive me.”

She stood up, came around the table and pressed her lips to his brow before she pulled him up from the bench. “Come on”, she said. “You need to sleep. This isn’t our last night yet, you know. If you want to tell me something so urgently, there’s still time.”

Holding his hand, she lead him along palely lit footpaths to the dwelling area. She still had her office and her bedroom in the same small bungalow. Gabriel felt her pushing him trough the dark of the hall. A door opened and he stumbled in. Martha helped him to pull off his shoes and trousers and pushed him onto the bed. He immediately felt much clearer.

She went over to the office. A strip of dim light fell into the bedroom and illuminated scattered underwear and piles of books. He heard Martha fumble with things. For a moment he nearly panicked and feared she’d leave him alone. Then it was dark again and she came back in. Gabriel groped for the small lamp on the bed table. An amber light cloaked Martha like a being not quite substantial as he switched it on.

She seemed to enjoy undressing in front of him. She turned slowly, opened her blouse and let her skirt fall down. The sight of her trim buttocks, her fine reddish pubic hair and her small firm breasts came to him as kind of a revelation. He felt as if he had never really looked at a woman before. It was something completely natural to see her embodying everything that he ever had desired.

“You know, Gabriel”, she said, “up to certain age humans act as if their life will last forever. As if the world would never end. I’m still young enough to feel this way, although I know that my feelings are wrong. When you get fifty or so you start to lose what you love and the finiteness of all things enters your view. Let’s say that the whole world has now come to recognize these basic facts of life. We know that there will be an end, and we know when to expect it. There is no way to use your remaining time perfectly. Whatever you have done or could have done, there would always be things left unsaid, left undone and left unfinished. So don’t torment yourself.”

She smiled, deeper and more affectionate than he had ever seen her smile before, and Gabriel looked away, ashamed by her refusal to reproach him in any way.

„I don’t know what to say“, he said.

„There’s no need to talk anymore“, Martha replied, lay down beside him and switched off the light. „It’s so good that you are here. What more can we want?“

He hugged and squeezed her soft warm body, and for a moment he had the feeling that no power in the universe could ever force him to let her go. It was in this moment that he first heard that strange sound that would grow ever louder until the final moments of his life. It was a low growl, a surge in the air as if something had just started to suck out the very heart of the world. His eyes wet with tears, Gabriel drifted into a troubled sleep and something in him searched the dark for Martha’s soul, trying to fuse with all her love and compassion that he had so foolishly failed to appreciate. He dreamed of the last few days left to them and of what still might be achieved. A slight pressure seized his body, as if something was trying to lift him up, stronger with each second. Martha began to mutter softly in her sleep, comforting words that he couldn’t understand and didn’t need to understand. The clock ticking in his mind stopped. The world would end, sometime, somewhere, but he had no doubt that this moment now would last forever. Love had taken him home. He lost all his fear and dreamed away, knowing that his life was complete.

 Copyright © 2011 by Michael K. Iwoleit

Michael K. Iwoleit was born in Düsseldorf in 1962 and now lives in Wuppertal. Since the mid Eighties he is active as writer, translator, critic, and editor mostly in the science fiction field. He is co-founder and co-editor of the German sf magazine Nova and founder and editor of InterNova. His fiction has appeared in translation in Croatia, Poland, Italy, England, and USA. He is especially known for his novellas for which he won the German Science Fiction Award three times and the Kurd Laßwitz Award twice. His latest book is Die letzten Tage der Ewigkeit, a story collection, published by Wurdack Verlag in 2012.

]]> http://nova-sf.de/internova/?feed=rss2&p=660 0 http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=655 http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=655#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 06:41:52 +0000 miwoleit http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=655 by Jean-Claude Dunyach

When Paranamanco broke out of her mooring lines and flew off into the night, I was hardly surprised. I remembered the words of the old navigator I’d interviewed a few months earlier, shortly after the animalcity project had been abandoned. I took the recording cube of our conversation out of a drawer and played it, wondering if I’d have the time to listen to it until the end…

“An entire herd? Can you imagine it? Twenty or so wild animalcities floating like medusas in space. The smallest could have served as the capital of any empire; the largest… No doubt you observed Paranamanco while orbiting in the transit satellite before landing here. You flew over it for several hours, skimming over the outgrowths we incorrectly call dwellings; maybe you even strolled along her avenues, with their disorderly striations carved by meteor dust. You may believe that you’ve seen her, but she continues to elude you as a result of her size, her topography with its folds and strangeness. There are entire neighborhoods which no one has penetrated yet, alleys that are not shown on any map, buildings of flesh waiting to be explored.”

The old man stopped to finish his glass. On a corner of my desk, the cube reader wove the image of a tavern, purring busily. I don’t like mute objects. We created things to fill our solitude with their omnipresent company, not for them to fall silent and echo the waves of our own silence back at us, amplified.

“If you’ve got the heart for it,” the old man said, “buy a recent plan and then have them drop you off anywhere in the city. You know the rule: when you find a street that hasn’t been identified, you can name it as you see fit and register it with the land titles office. There’s a bonus for each discovery, but it will hardly cover the cost of purchasing the 160 microfilmed volumes of the plan. Yet, how many people do you think are wandering about like that, shoulders bent under the weight of the microfilms and the viewer? Several thousand?”

He shook his head and glumly contemplated his empty glass, which was starting to crackle and release an unpleasant odor. After the last swallow, the glass walls, deprived of humidity, decompose rather quickly, obliging drinkers to order another round immediately.

The strident ring of the communicator shrilled through the apartment. I cut it off and went back to listening.

“You have your own opinion of Paranamanco. It’s undoubtedly incorrect, but mine is no better. It was a living organism before we decided to make it a city. A creature like that never really totally dies. Certain outlying neighborhoods rise and fall like respiration that is barely perceptible; the hollow filaments that we plan on using as transportation tunnels or sewer mains are sometimes animated by nervous shudders, like the axons of a failed brain.

“No, Paranamanco isn’t completely dead; I’ve known her far too long to be wrong about that. Before I landed on her surface, I observed her in the middle of the herd, in deep space. Then I explored her for months, looking for the control points of her nervous system. I planted thousands of needles randomly in her flesh before discovering her pleasure centers and mounting her like an elephant driver, armed with the whip of my electrical discharges. I forced her to follow me here, by trial and error. Once in orbit, I moored her, practically all on my own.

“You should have been there when we landed! Paralyzed by the cloud of tugs hooked to her circumference, she deployed her corolla of multicolored filaments and whipped the air, trying to trap the metal birds that flew within reach. She was magnificent and dangerous, a real carnivorous flower. No one could have forced her to obey if I’d dropped the reins.

“Of course, those who supervised the project had taken their precautions. Paranamanco was the first animalcity that we’d moored and, to date, she’s still the only one; the others are parked between the asteroids, waiting for the authorities to reach a decision. The idea of using a life form like this as an inhabitable zone on the surface of a colonized world is interesting, but it’s not to everyone’s liking. Many colonists would prefer us to build them something more conventional. Some categorically refuse to settle in a dwelling whose walls are made of living organic tissue.

“We all make the mistake of judging the animalcities by their appearance. A city is just a city, the imbeciles say, nothing surprising about that. That’s stupid, even dangerous. These creatures have nothing other than the most superficial points in common with the human species. Their architecture, their existence depends on rules beyond our knowledge, even though it does appear easy to apply our own rules to them. We can use them, but we can never understand them. Take heed: this is important!

“Everyone was walking on eggs at that time. The head honchos came here to supervise the operations and prevent any possible problems from causing too many waves.

“Finally they gave the explorers the go-ahead. That’s when the problems started…”

With a sigh, I pour him another drink. I’ve learned to recognize those points when stories wind down if they’re not fuelled – with alcohol, compliments or, occasionally, forgiveness. It all depends on the storyteller. The old man wasn’t looking for absolution; he just wanted to drink.

“I went there too,” I said.

He gazed at his glass in the light of a mood lamp and noisily drained a good half of it.

“I wasn’t looking to make my fortune. Capturing Paranamanco had already made me rich and, in any case, I’d never believed those tales of treasure buried in the animalcities’ entrails. No, I was bored. Setting out to hunt in deep space didn’t thrill me anymore. Any prey would have appeared minuscule to me after that catch.

“I’d started drinking, seriously drinking if you know what I mean. I set out on a whim one morning. I think that I was even getting tired of the alcohol and I was afraid of what would come next.

“I chose to explore the eighteenth sector, starting out from the base camp established in the heart of the city. The instructions provided for a spiral exploration of the neighboring streets, followed by satellite reconnaissance of the outlying neighborhoods. At that rate, it would have taken ten years to map the main arteries. Paranamanco wouldn’t have been inhabitable for a century.

“It’s impossible to realize just how vast she is if you haven’t tried to cross her alone. She’s brimming with optical illusions, fake terraces and underground arteries. The guide satellites are no use at all. Animalcity skin is impervious to radio waves; even the remote controlled units get lost. To bring her back to more human proportions, she had to be marked out with beacons filled with signs, and pointers; the chaos of her alleys had to be corrected, the still wild neighborhoods had to be domesticated.

“So, I set out to identify the most direct route possible to the edge of the city. If everyone else had done the same, we could have completed the map in two years and taken charge of the terrain.

“It’s a game, you see. Draw a map and you control the territory. The more accurate your map is, the more efficient your control is.

“Do you know how a new world is opened up for colonization? There are the mechanical caterpillars that lay kilometers and kilometers of fiber optic cables in a few hours. Release thousands of those machines on the surface of any planet and they lay out a grid of high-capacity lines and communication nodes, while sterilising the surface. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, you can rest assured that, after they’ve finished their job, there isn’t a single nook or cranny that hasn’t been explored. There’s always a telephone booth on the horizon. At any given time, you’re a 30-minute shuttle ride from civilization.

“I took one of those caterpillars with me…

“I don’t know why, but those caterpillars had no success with Paranamanco. They would either get lost or go completely crazy. They built closed lines that held them prisoner or wove electrified webs in which they hid, waiting for their prey. Apparently, some have even been found enveloped in a veritable cocoon, a prelude to an impossible metamorphosis. I’m only repeating what I’ve heard, but you know as well as I do that where there’s smoke there’s usually a fire.

“So, I headed off in the direction of the periphery with that caterpillar purring as it laid its wire. My belongings sat at the peak of its central ring, firmly moored to magnetic clamps. I walked ahead, hands in my pockets, as carefree as a Stanley who didn’t give a rat’s ass about Livingstone, while she crawled along behind me.

“About every ten kilometers, she’d stop to lay a new communication node, wrapped in placental tissue. It’s a curious sight, but you get tired of it quickly. After a day, I stopped paying attention. Besides, people say you shouldn’t get too close to those machines at such times. Now and then, their maternal love makes them dangerous. I made the most of these stops to stroll about the narrow alleys in the vicinity or I’d drink a glass to Paranamanco’s health. My supplies were supposed to last two months. That’s the main reason I’d brought the caterpillar along. With all the bottles, my luggage was too heavy for my old shoulders.

“After two days, we were navigating by sight between the constructions erected like pustules on the city’s bituminous skin. Most were empty and naked, with a faint smell of dried sweat. Others, encumbered by cartilage partitions or blood red drapes, would have driven an interior decorator mad. I didn’t have time to visit them all, so I settled for glancing inside the closest ones, so I could map those I considered inhabitable.

“The road we were following sloped down gently before branching out into narrower and narrower catwalks that led to the peaks of the buildings. Often, a building would be superimposed over the main artery and we’d move ahead into a dark tunnel, out of the range of the observation satellites. In such cases, our progress would be jerkier, the caterpillar’s headlights hesitantly sweeping away the dark. I’d keep my hand on its head ring, to reassure it.

“The farther we proceeded into the invisible levels of the city, the more uncontrollable my caterpillar’s reactions became. Her dilated sphincters released bunches of embryonic booths, most irreversibly deformed, exuding machine oil. I’d kick their protective envelope into bits, to alleviate their agony and prevent the development of interference in the communication network. When we got back to the surface, the caterpillar returned to normal. I stopped in a clearing so she could recharge her solar batteries.

“It was during one of these breaks that I realized we were no longer alone.

“Our trail was easy to follow; all they had to do was keep sight of the wires. Yet, I’d never have thought that someone would have bothered to tail us, the machine and me. We weren’t carrying anything valuable, apart from my booze, and I’d have willingly shared a bottle. And don’t for a minute think that we were surrounded by unknown creatures drawn from the depths of the city. Our trackers were human and they weren’t making much of an effort to hide.

“I could have set a trap for them, ambushed them in any alleyway. They’d had a dozen opportunities to do the same earlier, so… I stopped the caterpillar and waited for them, a bottle of alcohol in my hand. I know the rules.

“They, on the other hand, didn’t. They took so long to show their faces that I was three-quarters drunk by the time they arrived. I no longer clearly remember what they told me that evening; the next morning, all my bottles were broken and my skull was buzzing. Luckily, the girl made good coffee.

“There were two of them. A guy and a girl. About your age. I had him pegged right off: taciturn, with the long, slender fingers of a pianist. She was something completely different. A china doll, skin and bones, the type who has never turned anyone away and has decided that it was time for things to change. Apart from that, she was as silent as he was.

“After a few cups of java, I felt up to chewing them out for the loss of my bottles prior to hearing their side of this. They let me shout out my drunkenness before speaking with me. Good idea! I was too angry to do anything but vent my spleen. Plus, yelling almost drowned out the buzzing in my skull.

“They had a map to show me. Not a buried treasure map, that wasn’t their style, or one of those esoteric diagrams that the so-called Paranamanco fortune-tellers specialize in. They’re supposed to be able to read your future in the topographical maps of the city, you know, and show the future colonists the best places to settle. If necessary, they find the settlers a neighborhood where the layout of the streets corresponds to the lines on their hands. Utter stupidity.

“My two followers were a different sort of bright spark than I’d possibly come across before. They both worked in the department that tracked the data transmitted by the orbital satellites. The computer had highlighted anomalies in the aerial photos taken of Paranamanco, inconsistencies in the routes taken by certain streets, the type of detail that neither you nor I would have noticed but which the machines regularly set their sights on. They’d each been looking on their own for months, without joining forces, then they decided to pool their observations. They found the solution almost immediately.

“A fragment on the map of the city was repeated identically 44 times. A single fragment, but because of this duplicated element, the computer crashed every time it tried to reconstitute the Paranamanco jigsaw. Discouraged, the girl had drawn a map indicating the locations of the famous fragment.

“Once the coffee had its effect, they rolled their map out to show me. Forty-four spots were spread over the disk of the city, with no apparent symmetry or regularity. Yet, their pattern looked familiar to me. I got out my own map, the one showing the animal’s nerve centers, which I’d drawn during my deep space exploration. Mine was cruder, but there was nothing haphazard about the resemblance. Strangely, mine was offset one hundred and ninety degrees from theirs; a semi-circle, as if the two phenomena were of equal importance, but opposite in meaning.

“The route taken by the caterpillar was heading straight towards the closest spot, which is why they had decided to follow me. I believe they suspected my intentions were the same as theirs. As the first one to explore the creature, I was supposed to know more about her than anyone else. They thought I already had an inkling as to what the identical sectors hid, that the government had some secret goal when it had Paranamanco land and that it was exploring her through me. I didn’t disabuse them. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

“When we set out again, the caterpillar was carrying three packs instead of one, which didn’t seem to affect her all that much, and I had an audience to whom I could recount my memories of deep space. They knew how to listen, that much I can say for them, a bit like you, but then you’re paid to listen so it doesn’t count. The guy, Geoff, never said more than a few words at a time, and settled for moving ahead at his own pace. From time to time, he’d look back to see if the girl was still following. I’ve forgotten her name, but it will certainly come back as I talk.

“We were a good day’s walk from the interesting zone, which gave us time to review a fair number of hypotheses and invent a few new ones. The most curious thing was that, seen from the satellite, there was nothing particular about the duplicated fragment: three or four streets, completely ordinary outgrowths for buildings. Same old, same old. I could have walked through them without noticing a thing. Geoff thought it was some sort of visual illusion and that we should expect something else, underground tunnels maybe, or vast rooms filled with strange machinery. He fixated on that idea: the animalcities were once used as spacecraft by a humanoid race and had outlived their creators. This made for a good story, completely valid, when you have twelve hours of walk ahead of you and nothing else to do than survey the streets and christen them as you see fit.

“In any case, no one knew anything at all about the animalcities at the time, and we’ve learned precious little since. The colonization of Paranamanco was interrupted and it won’t start up again anytime soon. As for the rest of the herd, it’s wandering carefree about the asteroids. If we knew how to kill a wild city, our problems would be resolved for the most part, but I doubt we’ll ever reach that point. I’m starting to think that the entire operation is plain old stupidity, but no one’s asked me for my opinion in a long time.

“So, there we were, walking ahead of the caterpillar, because of the exhaust fumes, without even taking the time to visit the structures that surrounded us. We had the entire city to ourselves and the only thing that interested us was a block of three streets, which didn’t even have the excuse of being unique. At the time, that didn’t strike us. The idea only came to me on our way back.

“Imagine: today, there are almost one million colonists on Paranamanco, there’s noise, electricity, eleven official religions, an entire microcosm of the human species gathered on the surface of a flat organism that had the good sense to be inhabitable. I know that it will take at least half a billion people for the place to even start looking settled, but at the time that the three of us were walking along unexplored avenues there was no one within a 200 km radius. Not a soul! I don’t think that an ocean or a desert could give such an impression of solitude. Weirdly it wasn’t until the other two arrived that I even noticed.

“Then the wind started to blow down the empty streets and we stopped for shelter on a porch. Evening fell slowly. The buildings created unusual shadows, stretching in unexpected directions. I hadn’t had a drop to drink since the previous night, yet my usual hallucinations settled over the facades of the neighboring buildings. They were remodelling the scene that surrounded us. I desperately needed a drink and felt my nightmares swirling in around me, waiting for night to torment me. I didn’t have the strength to resist.

“We were approaching our goal. I suppose it was the first symptoms of Paranamanco’s influence, although the base doctor has talked to me about delirium tremens with a knowing smile. People like that always have a better explanation than yours and there’s no way to make them change their minds.

“The next day the others decided, without consulting me, to leave me there for the entire day while they went out to do some reconnaissance. I’d have refused if I’d known, but that double dose of sleeping pills in the coffee would have put anyone out like a light. When I opened my eyes, I was trapped in an unbreakable cocoon of cables and the caterpillar, which had been reprogrammed, was vigilantly standing guard over me.

“I’d wanted to warn the base that a couple of loonies were holding me prisoner so that someone would come and get me. It seemed easy; I was surrounded by communication booths. The caterpillar had woven a delicious little concentration camp for one where transmission cables replaced the barbed wire and booths replaced watchtowers. The only problem was that I didn’t have enough tokens.

“Before I even reached the base operator, my supply had run out. I was stupid enough to try to kick the box apart to collect its contents. My first mistake was choosing a freshly hatched booth; my second was forgetting the caterpillar’s maternal instinct.

“Possibly her reflexes should have been altered by the reprogramming, but that didn’t stop her from charging at me with the full speed of her segments, tearing her way through the cables she’d woven. We played a deadly game of tag, in which the neutral zones were the booths. Bit by bit, I was trying to draw her away from the breach she’d made in the network of wires that held me prisoner. When I thought it was a good time, I raced off towards the closest building, expecting to be caught and pulverized at any time. I’ve rarely been afraid, but I was that day.

“Once safe, I caught my breath before glancing behind me. The caterpillar hadn’t followed me at all; she stood motionless in the middle of her cocoon. On her back, the girl was waving in my direction.

“I turned about slowly, savoring my anger as it swept over me. I was preparing myself for one of those explosions that make novas look minor. In two days these two clueless young people had deprived me of my bottles, drugged me and forced me into a rodeo with a thirty-ton caterpillar. I had enough insults in mind to turn the air blue. Then I saw the tears rolling down the girl’s cheeks and I fell silent… What else could I have done?

“We broke camp in ten minutes. I cut the cable ahead of the anarchic section and made a splice directly on the machine’s hindquarters, short-circuiting the delirious skin that had imprisoned me. One more puzzle for the archeologists of the future. I allowed myself the luxury of using an iron bar to pulverize the booth that held my tokens and recovered them. I’m the first official vandal on Paranamanco. Don’t forget to mention that in your article.”

“Why were you in such a rush to leave?”

My voice rises out of the cube reader with an irritating fidelity, asking the right question at the right time.

In front of me, on the back wall of my office, the red warning light flashes in vain. I don’t feel like answering any call, especially right now.

“Geoff had disappeared in the unknown sector. The girl, Evalane (I knew her name would come back to me, Geoff called her Evie), well the girl had been afraid to continue their research on her own and had come back to release me so I could help her. Ten seconds later and she’d probably have found the caterpillar nibbling on a pancake-shaped cadaver. Bio-machines can be quite strange at times. My caterpillar would’ve probably laid flesh pink booths, with dial pads incrusted with eyes rather than keys. Just the thought of dialling a number under those conditions, fingers in eyes… Evie acknowledged that it was lucky for me that Geoff had chosen that particular moment to evaporate. How was I supposed to respond to that? I grumbled that luck had been smiling on me ever since they’d arrived, but the girl was insensitive to sarcasm.

“She had stopped crying, well almost. I hadn’t realized that she had a thing for him. When you live alone in space, you lose track of that sort of phenomenon. I had no idea just how important that was going to be later.

“Evie said there was nothing particular about the area where Geoff had disappeared. It looked like so many other neighborhoods that they’d walked through before. They had to backtrack and ask for a satellite location in order to find it. Geoff was disappointed and furious. He raced up and down the three streets, looking for a secret passageway, a hidden opening, without success. Then he started to explore the outgrowths one after another, coming back out a little more annoyed each time. Finally, she saw him go into a porch and he never came back out.

“According to the girl, there was nothing particular about the interior of the building either: a labyrinth of cartilage partitions, a rough floor, made of folds of dead skin. Since no one answered when she called out, she hadn’t dared to venture too far in and preferred to return to camp, taking care to spray-paint her initials on the porch.

“We approached cautiously. Nothing moved, no sound filtered out to us, no trace of Geoff. I picked up the caterpillar’s remote control as I pulled Evie away from the porch.

“‘We could get lost in that maze,’ I explained to her. ‘I’ll send the beast in to explore for us.’”

“‘Good idea!’ she said. ‘Then we can simply follow its wire to make our way back out without getting trapped by those damn partitions.’”

“‘After she’s done a tour inside, there won’t actually be many partitions intact,’ I replied.

“She blushed, which didn’t look good on her, and fell silent. The caterpillar rolled over to the entrance. Her segments proceeded into the building, one by one. We could hear the sound of fabric tearing, followed by irregular periods of silence. I glanced inside: the floor was strewn with cartilage debris and booths that had been laid all askew, imprisoned in their placental pouches. Just the place for a large-scale communication centre. I noted its location on the map, out of reflex, before carefully following in the caterpillar’s footsteps, accompanied by Evie.

“We made our way through the building diagonally, stumbling over the waste. A cloud of bone dust powered our clothing. We avoided coughing, for fear of giving birth to an echo we wouldn’t have recognized. I twisted my ankle and Evie fell in a pile of debris, from which she emerged looking like a ghost, bits of membrane hanging from her shoulders and hair like a transparent shroud.

“The caterpillar had stopped at the entrance to an immense multi-sided room that had remained intact. Evie slid past her body and almost immediately cried out. When I reached her, she was kneeling next to Geoff who lay unconscious, feverish, lips clenched, fingernails dug into bloody palms.

“We didn’t see the fountain right away. We were busy trying to revive our lost team member and didn’t have the time to study the surroundings closely. It was only when Geoff opened his eyes and pointed at it that I realised it was there. He hoarsely asked us to get him something to drink.

“Evie gave him a shot and poured the contents of her canteen between his lips. I stood up to disconnect the caterpillar. On my way, I glanced about, without noticing anything special: a murmur came from the thin ribbon of water that welled up from the ground and filled a cavity. It hadn’t rained in a week and I recall wondering where the water was coming from. But I didn’t think it was all that important.

“As soon as Geoff could stand up and before we could stop him, he rushed over to the fountain to drink. The water didn’t appear to have any particular effect on him. He offered me some, but I don’t really have an affinity for that type of liqueur at zero degrees.

“When we asked him why he’d fainted, he replied that he’d knocked himself out against a partition. The explanation was so stupid that we believed it and considered the matter closed. Evie apologized for dragging me into all this for nothing. Geoff received his share of insults from me for leaving me with the caterpillar, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I left it alone.

“We followed the wire back out. None of us tried to get away from the sector; we even decided to set up our camp at the intersection of two neighboring streets. Evie made some coffee. Without a word, Geoff held out her canteen so that she could go and fill it.

“I gave him a mild sedative so that he could rest for the remainder of the day and went out to explore the neighboring buildings, to form my own opinion.

“Evie was telling the truth; there was absolutely nothing to see in that sector. It was so similar to all the others I’d travelled through before that things were starting to look suspicious. I was caught up in the game, obstinately searching for something I didn’t know what it should look like. I palpated the city’s thick skin in hopes of detecting some sort of revealing pulse; I scratched esoteric maps in an old notepad, tearing the pages out as I finished them. In short, I behaved like an imbecile. Evie, who was watching over Geoff, called out to me from time to time, asking if I’d found anything and seemed to take no notice of my increasingly brief answers.

“The dark gradually chased me from the shadowy streets, in which it would be all too easy to lose my way. I gave up and sat down next to the electric hot plate where our evening rations were heating, along with an entire pot of coffee. Evie and Geoff glanced at me, but refrained from making a comment. Just as well. I couldn’t forgive them for breaking the pleasant monotony of my trip through the city. For the first time, Paranamanco had disappointed me and it was all their fault.

“I rolled up in my bedroll, as far from the caterpillar and them as possible, and tried to fall asleep. I’d had too much coffee for sleep to come easily but, with the help of the silence, I gradually felt myself doze off with the hope that the place would get rid of my two pests.

“That night I dreamt the same thing over and over again. I was hitting my head against the reality of the city like a moth blinded by light. When I woke up, Geoff had disappeared once more and the entire neighborhood seemed to have gone mad…

“Heavy bunches of colored light bulbs hung overhead, large drops of luminous sap dripping down. A vine of telephone cables climbed up the outgrowths, rolling in abundant, baroque spirals along the streets, in an unnatural embrace. Neon orchids with electrifying scents surged from the slightest chink in the walls, shooting lightning that bounced off Paranamanco’s skin. In a few hours, the neighborhood had been transformed into a virgin forest.

“Next to the dead hot plate and the caterpillar, which had been definitively disconnected, Evie lay plunged in a sleep evidently filled with nightmares. The ground around her was spiked by long, transparent spears, shimmering with violet sparks. I had to kick them to bits to get closer to her.

“Geoff had made her swallow the rest of the sleeping pills and had pinned a laconic note to her sleeping bag before heading off. I knew what it said before reading and re-reading it. Then I woke Evie.

“All around us, the neighbourhood was coming to life. The sun was already high and the dense fiber-optic jungle shimmered in the bright light. I almost expected Geoff to appear wearing a simple loincloth, leaping from vine to vine, hunting prey. But I knew that we’d never see him again. And, deep down, Evie did too.

“She refused to believe it, however, and wanted to look for him in that verdant growth, despite the evidence that surrounded us, despite Geoff’s note. She denied the facts. Hey, you try to convince a woman that her lover is capable of leaving her for a living organism that measures 600 km in diameter, a creature he had shared his dreams with…

“I had a lot of difficulty convincing her to listen to me. I’d known what was really going on with Paranamanco since the previous night, in part because of Evie. The water she’d used to make her coffee came from the fountain. Some of its power remained, despite the boiling, just enough that I knew what kind of trap Geoff fell into. Merely thinking that I could have suffered the same fate made me shiver. It would have taken so little. I must be one of the few people whose life has been saved by alcohol.

“I told Evie that the liquid had slowly poisoned Geoff, that the first time we’d found him, unconscious, he’d most certainly just drunk from the fountain and that, feeling that he was about to die, he preferred to distance himself from the camp, to spare us the spectacle of his agony. The note he had left her was the fruit of a brain that was already damaged; she shouldn’t pay it any attention. Of course, she didn’t believe a word of what I said, but it was the best lie I could come up with given the time available.

“She insisted that I tell the truth. I was stupid enough to do so…”

A long line of vehicles, sirens shrieking, is heading my way. Judging by the sound, they’re still far away enough for me to listen to the last surface of the cube, the most important one.

“The animalcities are incomplete organisms,” the old man murmurs, eyes staring at a horizon beyond my reach. “To successfully face the space that separates galaxies, they need symbiotic companions, gardeners capable of caring for them and maintaining them throughout the voyage. In exchange, they offer access to the entire universe, as well as the means to survive in the void of space.

“When I landed on Paranamanco’s surface for the first time, she understood that her race and mankind could get along. She flavored the water with her dreams accordingly. After tasting it, Geoff was able to give birth to the neon garden that surrounded us of his own accord. No doubt he was wandering about the adjacent neighborhoods, impatient to put his new powers to the test. I imagined the winding streets filled with hardy brambles, leaves flashing with lightning, tree streetlights, electric foliage stretching over the city’s squares, avenues illuminated by the flamboyant chalices of glass tulips. I realized that Geoff had not only shared Paranamanco’s dreams, but had also, in a certain manner, transmitted his own. She dreamed of looking like the cities on Earth, with their adornment of multicolored lights enshrined in metal and stone. All she needed was a little help.

“At the beginning, Evie refused to believe me, convinced that I was making the whole thing up for some totally obscure reason, that I didn’t know any more than she did. So, I placed my hands on the warm soil. A tiny neon flower sprang up and spat out its fire before expiring.

“She finally understood that we couldn’t do any more for Geoff. Only an expedition organized by the base would be able to find him, if it wasn’t already too late. The caterpillar was dead, we had no more water. Well, at least, I preferred not to try the water in our canteens, in case Geoff had filled them at the fountain. I left Evie, deeply wounded by my words, and set out, following the wire, to search for a booth that was working.

“I had no idea what my colleague on the other end of the line thought about my story and I didn’t care. Once I was certain that someone would come to get us immediately, I headed back to camp, and found it empty.

“Evie had carried off one of the canteens when she left. In a letter scribbled while I was away, she said that she was ready to join Geoff, to take her turn at serving the city. I castigated myself for not having seen that coming and I cried out her name until the echoes rebounded around me. I never saw her again.

“The most horrible part is that there was no chance for her project to succeed. Paranamanco was only interested in men. There was a sexual component between her gardeners and her that was essential for her survival. Evie was incapable of providing that and I suppose that the animalcities can occasionally get jealous…

“That evening, a shuttle came to pick me up, guided by the dead caterpillar’s beacon. When the pilot saw the scene, he called for reinforcements. A security cordon surrounded the site. But it was too late. We never found anyone.

“I don’t know how the information could have leaked out, but hundreds of colonists set out to look for Paranamanco’s secret wells. Those in charge implemented a news blackout, partly because they didn’t believe me. I’m an old wino, you know. It was fine and dandy for me to tell them over and over that it was the alcohol that had saved my life, but they remained sceptical. I can see their point of view and I would never have imagined that someone would come and interview me about all this.

“And you, do you believe me? If I weren’t half drunk, I’d string up a garland of lights to convince you, but Paranamanco doesn’t like alcohol and I believe I lost my power over her a long time ago. She doesn’t want me anymore. I had my chance and I blew it.”

Someone is banging brusquely at my door; the recording is over. My article has been rejected everywhere, without explanation. I’ve been under constant surveillance, but that doesn’t matter now. The city found her pilot; she was able to take off with her crew of dreamers and adventurers, whose hands will bring flowers back to the dead streets. No doubt, they’re far away already.

I have a minute or two before those who are looking for me break down the door. I grab the flask of the city’s dreams that the old explorer gave to me, before heading off into the streets with their sadly conventional signs and disappearing for good. Maybe I’ll have the time to uncork and drink it, but Paranamanco has flown off and I’m no longer certain that I can find her.

Translated by Sheryl Curtis

Copyright © 1987 by Jean-Claude Dunyach

First published in French in Imagine… n°45, éditions l’Atalante

Jean-Claude Dunyach, born 1957, is one of the leading contemporary French sf writers. He has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and supercomputing and works for Airbus in Toulouse in southwestern France. Dunyach has been writing science fiction since the beginning of the 1980s and has already published seven novels and eight collections of short stories, garnering the French Science-Fiction award in 1983 and the Prix Rosny-Aîné Awards in 1992, as well as the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire and the Prix Ozone in 1997. His works have been translated into English, Bulgarian, Croatian, Danish, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

Don’t worry.

This story has a good ending.

Well… for the bureaucrat.

**********

Once upon a time, in a country far, far away, there lived a bureaucrat. And the bureaucrat’s son, who was six at the time of this story, had very bad dreams. The bureaucrat’s son used to wake up in the middle of the night shouting, his heart pounding, his breath short. The son would run to his mother, the teacher, and his father, the bureaucrat, and they would hug him and tell him it was just a dream and that everything was all right.

This was not a problem specific to the bureaucrat’s son.

Many children had nightmares. Many adults had nightmares, as well. Although adults could more easily wake up and tell themselves that they had only been dreaming, and that none of it had been real. In fact, adults sometimes decided that, since it was only a dream, they would try to re-enter the dream and bring about a better ending.

This did not always work. Dreams are hard to control.

Well… dreams were hard to control.

But it is not yet time to tell you about that.

**********

On the night that our story begins two important things happened: the bureaucrat’s son had another dream and the bureaucrat received a phone call.

The bureaucrat’s son ran into his parents’ bedroom and told them how he had dreamt that a monster was waiting in the shadows, and how every time the monster ate, the shadows grew bigger. The son told them that in the dream the shadows were so big that they took over the entire world, and that there was only room for him and his parents. And then the shadow monster told him it was going to eat even more.

The bureaucrat held his son and told him it was just a dream. The teacher stroked her son’s hair and told him it was going to be all right.

Then the bureaucrat’s phone rang. He went to answer it because it was in the middle of the night, which meant that it must be urgent. The phone was outside the bedroom, and so the bureaucrat left his son with the teacher, who held her son tightly.

The mother and the son did not hear the phone conversation, but only snippets: “Are you sure it really works?” and “Did you test it?” and “So I can introduce it to the minister?”

After two minutes, the bureaucrat returned and said that he had to go now.

“What’s going on?” his wife asked.

The bureaucrat leaned closer and whispered in her ear. “The invention is ready,” he said. “Dreams are going to have good endings now. I have to go check if it really works.”

The teacher nodded. She invited her son to sleep with her in the bed so that nightmares wouldn’t come.

As the two fell asleep, the bureaucrat got dressed, and left his home.

**********

 When the bureaucrat met the scientist in his lab, the scientist showed him the tests he had done and how well the machine worked. Then the scientist explained to him that the machine reads a person’s neural impulses as the person sleeps. The machine can tell good dreams from bad dreams, because the magnetic resonance color is different. Then, ten minutes before the person has to wake up, the machine creates a magnetic impulse that is the opposite of the impulse created at the end of each bad dream.

Basically, the scientist explained, the machine returns the brain to where it was at the end of the bad dream, and then injects the magnetic resonance of a good dream, forcing the sleeper to dream something good at the end of the bad dream.

Taking into account that most people dream 3 to 4 dreams a night, the machine injects a good magnetic ‘vibe’ every two minutes, creating a good ending for each of the dreams the person had during the night.

It was a machine that gave good endings to dreams.

**********

The bureaucrat wasn’t just any bureaucrat. He worked for the country’s Minister of Education, who had a lot of influence with the country’s Prime Minister, whose job it was to decide in which direction to take the country.

That morning, the bureaucrat approached the minister and explained to him about the new discovery. He showed him the tests as well as documentary videos supplied by the scientist, which proved how well the machine worked. He explained how the machine read the brain’s magnetic resonance throughout the night, and how it injected the opposite of bad dreams back into the brain towards the end of the night. He explained to the minister that such a machine in every home would be great for all children and adults. He explained that it would end a lot of misery. And he also explained that such a machine would make the Minister of Education as well as the Prime Minister very popular and that they would probably be re-elected many times over simply for introducing this machine.

The Minister of Education was enthusiastic. He began the bureaucratic procedures that were required to get the approval of the government and to make the free use of such a machine in every home mandatory by law.

At the end of the meeting with the Minister of Education, the bureaucrat called his wife at home. His wife told him that their son had had another nightmare, even though he slept in his mother’s bed. The bureaucrat heard and sympathized but could not do anything.

When he finished talking to his wife, the bureaucrat felt that with the Minister of Education’s enthusiasm, nightmares would soon be a forgotten phenomenon.

**********

The path to get the government’s approval was not an easy one. Many people objected to the idea.

The Minister of Justice shouted that the government has no business going into the brains and dreams of the populace.

The Minister of Education said that people would be happier if their experience during the night was constantly a happy one. They would wake up cheery and feeling good about themselves, which would make the populace a happy populace.

The Minister of Defense clamored that giving children a good ending to every story was not a good lesson for life, which was filled with both good experiences and bad ones.

The Minister of Education explained that children need good endings. The sorrows of life should not be faced at such a young age.

The Minister of Health was outraged, because what the Minister of Education was actually suggesting was that the government medicate all its children with sedatives of the mind. “You are basically creating children who think everything is good and happy. These children will be ill-suited to face life,” he insisted.

The Minister of Education suggested that perhaps if an entire generation grows up knowing only happiness and good feelings, then perhaps everything will change and life will no longer contain so much hardship. “Without anger and resentment,” the Minister of Education said, “without fear and frustration, the world will be changed.”

“You are creating sheep,” the Minister of Health proclaimed. “Sheep!”

The Minister of Education explained that he was ending suffering. “Children do not need to suffer,” he said. “How can the suffering of children be a good thing?”

The Minister of State insisted that pain is good. He explained that people need pain and bad experiences in order to form a full personality. “Sorrow makes us better people,” he explained. “Pain, as much as it hurts, builds character and depth and knowledge.” He further explained that, “Hardship makes us strive to do better and try harder to achieve our goals.”

At the end of long discussions that lasted weeks, too many people within the government were opposed to this new idea. Without a majority in the government, the Prime Minster would not turn the bill into a law.

But then, on the last day of discussions, the bureaucrat, who was sitting silently behind his minister all through the debates, stood up and said, “My son has nightmares every day. My son wakes up screaming every day. He is six years old. How can this be good for him? Lately, the experience of his nights is becoming the experience of his day. After such a long period of nightmare-filled nights his days are riddled with fear. He is six years old. I would do anything to stop those nightmares. Wouldn’t you do the same for your children?”

After that speech, no one said anything. Everyone was in agreement and the government approved the machine and approved the policy of giving such a machine freely to any home with at least one child.

**********

It took six months for the government to turn the bill into a binding law. The government used this time to explain the machine and the idea behind it to the populace. In the government’s commercials, the bureaucrat’s convincing and empassioned speech was played again and again until every parent could recite it by heart and they agreed with the proposal.

Six months after the bureaucrat’s speech, it became law that the government distribute these machines freely to all homes with children. Homes without children could buy the machines cheaply.

Immediately afterwards, the government began mass-producing millions and millions of machines that gave good endings to all dreams dreamt at night.

It took two months for the machines to arrive in the mail all around the country, and during that time time, the nightmares of the bureaucrat’s son had not stopped. After the teacher and the bureaucrat lay their son to sleep they went into the kitchen where the teacher discovered a box in the mail.

“The good ending machine arrived today,” she said. “Shall we put it in his room?”

The bureaucrat opened the box and looked at the machine. “No,” he said. “Everyone else is using it. Everyone else will be sheep. Our son will be a beast. And he will rule the sheep.” With that, he broke his son’s machine.

**********

 As you can see, this truly was a story with a good ending… for the bureaucrat.

Copyright © 2012 by Guy Hasson

Guy Hasson is an Israeli playwright, film maker and science fiction writer. While he writes plays and scripts mainly in Hebrew, his fiction is almost exclusively written in English. He is a two-time winner of the Israeli Geffen Award: he won it in 2003 for his story “All-of-Me(TM)” and in 2005 for his story “The Perfect Girl”. Since 2006 he has focused on production of original films, including the feature-length A Stone-cold Heart. News about his work are to be found at https://guyhasson.wordpress.com/

]]> http://nova-sf.de/internova/?feed=rss2&p=650 0 http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=643 http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=643#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:30:18 +0000 miwoleit http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=643 by Justin Isis

1. Wilhelm intended the first public exhibition of the artwork to take place between late February and early March 2010. For at least two months he had been in contact with Robert Lean, Director of Curatorial Services for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His communications consisted of a series of phone calls and e-mails and, apparently, an unsuccessful attempt to meet Lean when he returned home in the evening.1 Wilhelm always specified his intention to give the artwork away rather than sell it – all he wanted was a chance to expose the public to what he had created.

2. Wilhelm was born in Western Australia on October 3, 1979, and grew up in the Thornlie suburb of Perth. His father, Chris Wilhelm Senior, was a mining engineer; his mother, Leah, a housewife. An only child interested in astronomy and model airplanes, Wilhelm lived a solitary but contented existence. His early years passed without incident; there were few conflicts with peers or teachers, no instances of destructive or rebellious behaviour. His grades were polarized; he excelled at what interested him and failed at what did not. His results in the sciences, particularly chemistry and biology, were in the top rank of his class, but his assessment report showed a total indifference to the humanities.2 He graduated from the University of Western Australia in 2001, then travelled to Sydney for postgraduate studies in molecular biology.3

3. Transcript of Wilhelm’s initial e-mail to Lean:

From: ccsrchriswhlm23@gmail.com

To: lean@artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Date: Thursday, December 23, 2009 7:45 PM

Dear Mr. Lean,

My name is Christopher Wilhelm, Jr. Although I have no prior exp. in the art world I have been to your gallery many times. I kindly request some of your time to show you an artwork I have recently created. I believe it is something that has never been seen before or thought of. I know that once you see what I have created, you will want to help me show it to as many people as possible. I am only asking for five minutes of your time and if you are not interested after that I will not contact you again.

Sincerely,

Christopher Wilhelm4

4. Much of what is known about Chris Wilhelm comes from Régine Chapel, his partner during the artwork’s creation, roughly between July and December 2009. Born in Lyons to a French father and a Vietnamese mother, Régine emigrated to Australia as a university student and obtained citizenship several years later. She met Wilhelm at a scientific conference in Sydney in late 2007. Wilhelm had prepared a presentation on RNA-based retroviruses and as Régine strolled through the convention centre she caught sight of his table. Although their areas of research differed slightly, Régine was intrigued by Wilhelm’s premises and asked if she could talk to him alone later in the evening. Wilhelm – used to the paranoid nature of the research community, where leads are guarded closely – was at first hesitant. However, Régine’s manner convinced him she had no intention of stealing his ideas. At this first meeting they mostly discussed speculative areas of research, few of which related directly to either of their current projects.

5. Lean gave a brief stock response to Wilhelm’s e-mail, explaining that since the Gallery was a public art museum, it usually only exhibited works from its permanent collection or those on loan from other collections. He advised Wilhelm to check the yearly exhibition schedule to find times when the Gallery would be accepting open submissions. In his reply, Wilhelm stressed the non-commercial nature of his artwork and repeated that nothing like it had been attempted before. In his following e-mails he made other vague but grandiose claims about the artwork’s merit while refusing to clarify its nature; he needed to show Lean in person. Lean recalls setting his expectations low; this kind of behavior, in his mind, was associated with mediocrity. But Wilhelm’s persistence, and what Lean described as the “odd, naive formality” of his messages convinced him to grant Wilhelm the requested five minutes.5

6. Wilhelm’s coworkers described him as an unremarkable man, diligent and reliable, but introverted and somewhat awkward. At social functions he seemed passive, responding to questions but offering no observations of his own.6

7. It might be wondered why Robert Lean, obviously a man with numerous prior commitments and little time to spare, decided to grant an interview to a complete unknown who was not represented by an agent. Perhaps Lean – who as a young man had been fascinated by the outsider art of Darger, Lobanov, and Rizzoli – held out hope of discovering a prodigy. But it is more likely that he never had any intention of exhibiting the artwork. He and the other curators would convene for a coffee break, inspect Wilhelm’s efforts and offer a polite rejection. And according to Lean this is exactly what happened. He has always claimed that Wilhelm was a fraud and the artwork a hoax. The media interest in the events of late February he attributes to journalistic irresponsibility.7 Even after the deaths of Meyer and Veldenz, which he refuses to link to the artwork, Lean has maintained that his initial suspicions of mediocrity were justified.

8. Régine claimed that, although often untalkative, Wilhelm showed no signs of unusual behavior during the first two years they lived together. He seems to have had only one, minor eccentricity: sometimes he seemed to be listening to something. He would turn his head up as if he had just been asked a question, and if someone spoke to him he would not answer for a minute or so, until the spell broke. When asked about these infrequent, listening silences, Wilhelm dismissed them.

9. The interview lasted no more than five or six minutes. Wilhelm arrived at the Gallery on February 8th at around five o’clock, wearing a newly-bought white dress shirt and carrying a small metal box under his arm.8 Lean met him in the cafe in Lower Level 1. With him were Philip Meyer and Sebastian Veldenz, the head curators of photography and Asian art, respectively. Introductions were made and then Wilhelm opened the box. As neither Meyer nor Veldenz mentioned the interview to anyone before their deaths, Lean’s various conflicting statements are the only insights we have into what happened next. While never specifying what he saw in the box, in his interview with the Australian Art Review, Lean referred to it as “some piece of kitsch.”9 Given his well-known views on Wilhelm, this cannot be interpreted as a literal description. What is certain is that, after looking into the box for a few moments, Lean told Wilhelm that it was not the sort of thing the Gallery was looking for at the moment, and that it would be better for him to try sending it somewhere else. Meyer and Veldenz made similar statements, the latter recommending that he build up a larger portfolio before contacting anyone again. Unaffected by this negative reception, Wilhelm thanked the curators for their time and left the Gallery.

10. Following Wilhelm’s departure, Lean, Meyer and Veldenz remained in the cafe for approximately fifteen minutes, discussing business.10 At around five-thirty, Philip Meyer made his way to St. James Station and caught the train to his house in Hurlstone Park. His wife Marilynne, a nurse, was still at work. When Marilynne Meyer returned home at nine-thirty, she called out and, receiving no response, assumed her husband was asleep. She prepared dinner for herself and turned on the television. While watching a documentary on the Battle of Okinawa, she fell asleep on the couch and awoke two hours later at eleven-thirty. At this point she went upstairs to prepare for bed. But when she tried to open the door to the bedroom, Marilynne found it blocked by a heavy object. This, as she discovered when she forced her way in, was the body of her husband; Meyer had hanged himself from the doorknob with an electrical cord. The coroner’s report estimated the time of death at eight o’clock. On the bedside table was a note in Meyer’s hand, which read:

The light seems different in other countries. France, Southern Italy. I have always remembered summertime in America – the Midwest, where we travelled together. The light washing over the corn fields. You feel the heat of the day coming on, and then the sun stains everything a strange golden colour.11

Well-known in the arts community for his exhibitions of historical photographs of Sydney, Meyer had himself been a photographer of some distinction, specialising in urban landscapes.12

11. Robert Lean did not learn of Meyer’s death until around noon the next day. After his initial shock he assumed it to be an accident, as Meyer had no known enemies and no history of depression. When the police report made it clear that Meyer died by his own hand, Lean was left in the same position as Marilynne, that of total incomprehension. At this stage he made no connection between Meyer’s death and Wilhelm’s artwork, and while the police briefly questioned him about it, they were more interested in Meyer’s recent behavior, which both Lean and Veldenz described as normal.13 Only under the journalist Micah Peterson’s direct questioning did Lean recall the previous day’s meeting in any detail. It seems fair to say that if Peterson had not pressed Lean on this point, there might still be no public awareness of the artwork at all.

12. At six P.M. on Wednesday, February 10th, Sebastian Veldenz left the Gallery and headed to Martin Place Station. At around six-thirty he walked up to the South Coast Line platform and, as several bystanders looked on, threw himself under the train.14

13. Wilhelm conceived of the artwork some time during his thirtieth year. Prior to this he had shown no inclination towards creative work of any kind nor any interest in that of others, although as his emails to Lean suggest, he had made several visits to the NSW Gallery.15 According to Régine, during the artwork’s gestation period in early 2009, Wilhelm was even more reticent than usual. At dinner he would stare down at the table as if in a trance, often becoming fixated on a particular object,perhaps a stray train ticket or paper clip, which he would manipulate ceaselessly, tearing or twisting out of shape. When Régine remarked that something seemed to be troubling him, he would tell her that he was considering an original project, one well outside the range of his present research. Wilhelm’s behaviour during this period cannot rightly be called secretive, as secrecy would imply that he had conceived of the artwork in definite terms from the start, which does not seem to have been the case. If anything he was as surprised as Régine at the direction the project was taking, and much of the early labour seems to have been purely mental. It was not until mid June that Wilhelm began secluding himself in the spare room for the long sessions that eventually produced the artwork.

14. There is still no consensus as to what the artwork was. This might seem surprising when it is public knowledge that Wilhelm showed it to at least three people and went to some lengths to show it to more. Régine claimed that Wilhelm never specified what he was working on but promised that he would eventually reveal everything to her.

15. The spatial dimensions of the artwork are also in dispute. In the early days Wilhelm often spoke of acquiring a larger room to house it, but when he presented it for inspection at the Gallery he had been carrying it in a small metal box. Some have theorised that the artwork was performance-based and not a material object at all, but if this was the case then Wilhelm still expended considerable resources devising it. From late May through to the end of June 2009 he collected materials for his project, scouring specialty stores, junk shops and internet auctions for a wide array of items. To Régine’s amusement he brought home mirrors, metronomes, hourglasses, kaleidoscopes, tuning forks, computer parts, chemical batteries and old-fashioned cameras. It is uncertain whether these diverse objects actually constituted the artwork, or whether they were a means of producing or arriving at it. Régine later claimed that when she finally investigated the spare room some of the materials appeared brand new, while others had been subtly altered and many more were missing.16

16. As the year progressed, Wilhelm spent more and more time alone in the spare room. Régine was at first pleased that he had found a hobby, but she grew concerned as his periods of isolation increased. Neither did Wilhelm’s silence reassure her. When she confronted him, she learned little more than that his project was not of a strictly scientific nature and could be more readily classified as art. However, it was not any kind of art that had been seen before. As can be imagined, his evasiveness only increased her curiosity. Wilhelm’s dependability had initially appealed to her more than his imagination, so this new direction he was taking was incomprehensible to her. But Régine was not the sort of person to be put off by eccentricity. Even as she wondered at the degree of privacy he required, she trusted that Wilhelm would do as he promised and unveil the artwork to her and everyone else. If it was truly something significant then it would justify the time spent on it. And if it turned out to be unsuccessful, there would be no cause for despair: in art, as in science, there were bound to be false starts.

17. Wilhelm completed the artwork some time before dawn on December 3, 2009. Since mid-November he had taken to waking at 3:00 AM to work on his project while the rest of the world slept, and when Régine entered the kitchen that morning she found him just finishing breakfast. Over coffee he explained that he had finished the artwork an hour earlier. She congratulated him, but he seemed more distracted than elated and said nothing about what he would do next. Régine, though, was relieved; for the past month Wilhelm had lived entirely for his project, cancelling his few social engagements and rarely leaving the spare room. Régine had grown used to him ignoring her at dinner and leaving their bed at all hours of the night. Now, with the artwork out of the way, she hoped things would return to normal.

18. If Meyer’s suicide was unexpected, then Veldenz’s was improbable enough to draw significant media attention. The deaths of two well-known curators within the space of a week was a suitably lurid topic for the papers, and before long a number of journalists contacted Lean, chief among them Micah Peterson from the Sydney Morning Herald. Lean and Peterson were acquaintances for some years, as Peterson had often visited the gallery and reported on its exhibitions for his paper’s Saturday Arts section. Now he wanted to interview Lean as soon as possible. Over the phone he explained that his article would be an appreciation of Meyer and Veldenz’s contributions to the Sydney arts community and a lament that these contributions had ended before their time. Lean consented, and Peterson arrived at his office on Friday the 12th. During the course of the interview Lean showed Peterson several of Wilhelm’s e-mails and briefly described their meeting in the coffee shop.17

19. Peterson’s article went to press on February 15th. As he indicated to Lean, it is mostly a summary of Meyer and Veldenz’s careers with sympathetic appraisals from a number of well-known artists. Wilhelm is brought in only in the final two paragraphs, which recount the two curators’ last meeting. After describing how their deaths followed their rejection of the artwork, Peterson concludes with:

“The price of good taste?”18

20. From a distance of thirty years, Peterson’s closing line seems more frivolous than sensational. While the implication that Meyer and Veldenz committed suicide as a critical response to Wilhelm’s artwork – or were otherwise mortally affected by it – is at best inappropriate. To be fair to Peterson he could not have anticipated the epigram’s later, literal interpretations. However, within a few days, articles appeared in other publications claiming a direct link, supernatural or otherwise, between Wilhelm’s project and the deaths.19 The idea of an artwork which could trigger suicidal ideation (or, in the more embroidered accounts, sudden death) proved a fitting theme for an urban legend. Rumours spread to the effect that Lean would be the third to die, with extreme variants suggesting that curators around Australia would expire regularly until the artwork was bought by a major gallery. This generated a brief upsurge of popular references, with comedy shows, radio programs and newspaper cartoons all mentioning the artwork. Within a few months students at the University of Sydney had produced a horror film on the theme.20

21. In the week following the NSW Gallery’s rejection, Wilhelm tried to interest other galleries in the artwork, sending e-mails and phoning curators from around Sydney. He even went interstate, contacting the Sutton Gallery in Melbourne and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art – all with no success.21 Lean had been good enough to humour him, but other directors evidently did not have the time to spare. This continued rejection seems to have forced him to a reevaluation of the artwork, as Régine described him emerging one day from the spare room and telling her he had decided to rework his project. The date is unclear, but it must have been some time around February 13th. This is a crucial point, as it means that Wilhelm reached his decision to shelve the artwork before hearing of Meyer and Veldenz’s deaths. As this is dependent on Régine’s word, it has naturally been obscured in much of the literature.

22. Régine came across Peterson’s article while reading the paper at breakfast. Alarmed, she immediately showed it to Wilhelm, who seemed indifferent to the idea of a major newspaper linking his name, however facetiously, to unexplained deaths. But Régine encouraged him to take legal action, as any negative publicity could have repercussions on his job. Wilhelm told her he would contact the paper, but before the day was out he was himself contacted by journalists who had read the article. Régine saw this as a chance for Wilhelm to defend himself in print, and at her urging he agreed to a number of interviews.22 This was the beginning of his brief period of public prominence. Although the interviews never gained the readership of the Herald piece, they prompted further interest in the curators’ deaths and inspired many of the later, more speculative articles.

23. None of the interviews are worth quoting at length. It is enough to say that Wilhelm maintains his characteristic approach, stressing the artwork’s singular nature while never offering a specific description of it. He appears indifferent to the suicides, expressing a perfunctory sympathy for the deceased but giving no insight into their possible motivations. His responses display a total absence of rhetoric; he gives no motivation for creating the artwork, no indication of having anything to say. There is no sign of the spirited public defence Régine had expected.

24. Wilhelm took little advantage of the media attention. If he had been purely mercenary he could have produced any object and passed it off as the artwork, as even a stray piece of trash would have commanded a high price merely by association with his name. Within a few weeks galleries and private collectors were offering him large sums to unveil or sell the artwork, all of which he – perversely, given his earlier efforts at promotion – refused.23 He was invited to parties and exhibitions and attended some of them, always maintaining an air of detachment. He became, in a sense, the ultimate conceptual artist, his career founded on an abstraction, a phantom artwork which amassed significance even as it lacked any definite qualities. But if the artwork was a hoax then Wilhelm went to great lengths to maintain it, even in the privacy of his home. To Régine’s disappointment he was now spending as much time in the spare room as he had during the previous year. He rarely slept and often went for long night walks, not returning until after Régine had left for work. All this suggests a sincere uncertainty about the direction of his project.

25. During this period Robert Lean did his best to downplay the interest in Wilhelm, dismissing the articles’ speculative fancies and shrugging off any fears about the artwork’s negative influence by boasting of his perfect health.24 It is clear from his remarks that he blamed Peterson for mentioning Wilhelm in the first place, and the journalist was presumably no longer welcome at the NSW Gallery.

26. On April 22nd Wilhelm attended a video-themed exhibition at the David Channing Gallery in Surry Hills. Curated by Tomoko Ishihara, the exhibition showcased a number of new artists, some of whom would go on to long careers. The highlight was probably an early Jeff Dowling installation, which Wilhelm would have seen as he strolled through the Gallery. One incident from this exhibition stands out: towards the end of the evening, the artist Danny Curry remarked that Wilhelm – who was relaxing in a chair with a glass of wine, evidently lost in thought – would soon have to get back to work. In response to this reference to the artwork, Wilhelm said:

“I’m editing it right now.”

He made no attempt to explain what he meant. 25

27. On June 17th Régine returned from work to find the house empty. She assumed Wilhelm was in the spare room or out on one of his walks. When he had not returned after several hours she called his mobile and received no response. She tried again in the morning, and when Wilhelm did not answer she called his workplace and learned that he had not shown up the previous day. After this she contacted the police. They informed her that every day over twenty-eight people were reported missing in New South Wales, and over ninety-nine percent of them were eventually located. 26

28. Wilhelm’s coworkers were bewildered by his disappearance.27 Although he had exhausted himself over the artwork in his spare time, Wilhelm had performed his duties at work with his usual care, showing no signs of instability or unusual behaviour. His parents, when contacted, claimed not to have heard from him in weeks. No one in the art world had any idea either, as Wilhelm had not cultivated any close friendships. While most disappearances of this kind have banal explanations, the police were left with very little to work with. They continued to reassure Régine that he would most likely turn up, even as weeks and then months passed with no sign of him. With no way of knowing whether Wilhelm would return, or if he was even still alive, Régine was left in a state of total uncertainty.

29. With the passing of time, the popular references to the artwork gave way to a more specialised interest, academic in tone but often equally dubious. I am referring here to books such as Eric Han’s Chris Wilhelm and the Art of Invisibility and J. Scott Abbott’s The Enigma of Chris Wilhelm. While valuable in some cases for the information they provide on Wilhelm’s life, most of them are heavily tainted by the authors’ prior agendas, with the worst being indistinguishable from the kind of pseudo-mystical tracts which conflate angels, aliens and Atlantis into some vague cosmology.28 The problem is that, judging from the publicly available evidence, the conservative researcher is liable to agree with Lean that Wilhelm accomplished nothing. The artwork remains inaccessible, and there is no accurate way to determine what role, if any, Wilhelm played in the curators’ deaths. The entire affair would seem to be nothing more than one of those improbable curiosities which arise from time to time, catching the public eye for a while but quickly forgotten when no longer topical.

30. In late February 2011 I attended a party in Watsons Bay thrown by my friend Anthony Gordon. The usual medical crowd was there, along with a few unknowns. I have never liked those sorts of parties and before long I grew bored and headed outside for a smoke. I remember the feeling of relief as I stepped onto the veranda: it had been a dry summer, but now I felt the stirrings of a breeze coming to me from across the city. Boats moved across the harbour. A handful of stars were visible. As I took out my lighter I noticed another smoker leaning against the railing a few feet away from me. She looked to be in her early thirties, and while her head was inclined in my direction, her gaze seemed to move past me, so that I was not sure whether she had noticed me at all. She was striking, but the first thing I noticed was her extraordinary thinness; she seemed almost emaciated and there was something sad about her. I introduced myself and learned she was a research scientist – a friend of a friend, one of Anthony’s numerous acquaintances. This was my first meeting with Régine. I was familiar with Wilhelm in a vague way, but I did not learn of her connection to him until some time later. All that struck me then was how distant she seemed.

31. In The Enigma of Chris Wilhelm, J. Scott Abbott contends that Wilhelm repeatedly exposed Régine to the artwork. He admits to having little evidence, as Régine refused all requests for interviews, but claims that, as he shared a house with her while developing the artwork, Wilhelm would naturally have shown it to her, even if she was not aware of it.29

32. When I could not forget Régine after a week, I contacted her and asked if she remembered me. She did, and we agreed to meet for coffee. It did not take me long to determine that something terrible had happened to her. But I did not question her – it was enough for me to see fragments of her personality rising to the surface, a vibrancy that nothing had been able to kill. Most of the literature on Wilhelm has confined her to the role of a victim, which is a misconception I will do my best to correct. Régine Chapel was a capable scientist in her own right and more than Wilhelm’s equal. In an era when pharmaceutical companies were reducing medicine to a series of pre-written recipes to be followed without question, Régine was passionate about every area of her research, never thinking of health in terms of profit. Everyone who worked with her spoke of her patience and dedication. To these I would add her generosity and, that even rarer quality, her absence of self-pity. No one who really knew her was able to forget her.

33. I continued to meet Régine, sometimes for coffee, sometimes for dinner. I was ten years older than her but I rarely felt the difference. She told me about her past, and of Wilhelm, although I never pressed her. At first it seemed important only in an abstract sense; all that mattered to me was that she was alive and sitting across from me. I was never certain what she thought of me, but I had to assume she appreciated my company. While naturally sociable, she had grown increasingly isolated after Wilhelm’s disappearance. In retrospect I can see that I did not have anyone I could speak with honestly either, and perhaps this is what drew me to her in the first place. We remained friends for a few months, until it seemed more reasonable for us to move in together.

34. Régine and I lived together for five years. I did my best to support her, but it became clear that her problems were not anything I could solve. She admitted to suffering from blackouts and instances of missing time, although routine physical and neurological examinations revealed nothing. In addition to these regular medical checks I encouraged her to talk to a psychologist, and on my recommendation she made an appointment with Dr. Amit Sharma, who was familiar to me through Anthony. From October 2011 to January 2012 she spoke to him for an hour every week and at her request he taped their sessions together. The following is excerpted from a session dated November 3, 2011:

[Régine] Chris was out of the house, I was alone and -

[Sharma] He was working?

No. I can’t remember. He was just out. I went to the spare room…

The door was unlocked?

Well he never actually locked it, I just thought he didn’t want me to go in there.

And when did this take place?

Towards the end, in November. I was getting worried about him – I thought what if he’s doing something dangerous or, I don’t know…he never said anything and I was worried about him. I always trusted him but I wanted to make sure everything was okay.

So you went into the spare room…

I went in and, I don’t know how else to say it but it was like stepping outside. It wasn’t like going into a room in a house. I felt like I’d stepped out the front door to somewhere. I felt the sun overhead; there was grass under my feet. Somehow I knew I was in France, it was France when I was a little girl. It had all happened to me before. I must have been twelve or thirteen and I was with my parents – we were having a picnic.

You were watching all this?

No, I was inside it. I was inside myself. Does that make any sense? It was like I’d walked into my memory. Everything I’d forgotten, I remembered it all perfectly, it all came back to me so suddenly: that day, the picnic. But I wasn’t watching it, I was twelve, thirteen years old. Everything happened just as I remembered it, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world. [A pause] Do you understand? I was myself now and thirteen years old at the same time. I was thinking about school and my friends – I could remember everyone’s name. I felt the entire day passing, and when it got dark we got in the car and went back home.

What happened then?

I woke up. I was sitting on the couch, but I had no idea how I got there. It wasn’t like I woke up slowly, I didn’t feel sleepy at all. I was just there. But then I forgot everything again. By the time Chris got home I couldn’t remember any of it.

And you entered the spare room again?

No, not until a few months later.

And what happened?

Nothing. It was just the spare room. There was nothing there, just all the junk Chris had collected.

35. Dr. Sharma concluded that the shock of Wilhelm’s disappearance had had a traumatic effect on Régine which manifested in her dreams. She was placed on antidepressants and continued to attend regular counseling sessions, and in December of that year she underwent hypnotherapy. This allowed her to work through some of her experiences of the previous year. The following are excerpted from a number of these sessions:

“I’m sitting on the couch and there are colours moving over the floor. I feel something inside me, like a baby kicking. I fall asleep, or wake up, I can’t tell which. Chris comes in and tells me everything is all right. We start watching a movie.”

“I keep having deja vu. I don’t know what it means. It’s when you feel like you’re remembering something you saw in a dream. But I have it in dreams too. I dream and I feel like I remember things…”

“A colour that moves, and people hidden in the colour. [nearly inaudible] I don’t want to keep looking…in that direction.”

36. By January Régine’s condition had improved; she seemed less distant and there were no more blackouts. Still, she never recovered completely. The dreams continued, though she tried to downplay them, and she never slept more than five or six hours a night. Sometimes she became frightened by the most trivial things: a knock at the door, a sudden bright light, a crow’s caw outside the window. I was often frustrated by my failure to understand her, but I learned to adjust to her as I imagine she must have adjusted to me. I felt then and I feel now that her problems were the least important thing about her. I loved her.

37. Despite his scientific bent, during his mid to late teens Wilhelm became interested in esoteric religions, particularly the Pythagorean cult and its prime symbol, the Tetractys. The intersection of mathematical and metaphysical ideas seems to have stirred his imagination. During this time Wilhelm kept a journal, which I have next to me as I write. It is a cheap spiral notebook, heavily dog-eared, its cover decorated with circles, pyramids, pentagons and decagons. Wilhelm’s handwriting is small and cramped, idiosyncratic but always legible. He makes no reference to his daily life; the entries are concerned entirely with commentary on books – mostly classics of philosophy and theology, but also more obscure works. Often passages are simply copied out verbatim, but others seem to be original formulations. One reads:

Even if all intelligence in the universe is concentrated on a single planet, this planet still manifests the intelligence of the entire universe. Therefore there is no “environment,” there is only a nervous system aware of its extensions.

From a different page:

Consecration and transubstantiation are the only significant ideas ever developed by the Western orthodoxy: they only suffer from a failure of imagination. It is not enough to consecrate hosts; everything should be consecrated; everything should be indiscriminately converted into God.

By the time he entered UWA Wilhelm had apparently lost all interest in religious topics. Régine claimed that he never asked her about her beliefs or said anything regarding his own, and she never saw him attend church or any other religious service. This was borne out by his coworkers. On surveys and official forms he filled in his religious affiliation as “other.”

38. On the morning of March 7, 2016, my alarm awoke me at six-thirty, as usual, and I got out of bed. I noticed that Régine was still asleep beside me, which was unusual, as most mornings she awoke at least an hour before me and prepared breakfast. I assumed she was tired from work, and thought nothing of it as I went to take a shower. When I returned Régine was still in bed. I tried to wake her, first shaking her gently, then speaking her name. When she did not respond I shook her more forcefully – I think it was then that I realised something was wrong. I threw off the covers and continued to shake her, yelling out her name. I listened for the sound of her heart: there was nothing. She was dead. Even when I realised this I continued to press my face against her, holding her as tightly as I could.

39. Régine officially died from a sudden cardiac arrest. While she had not previously been diagnosed with heart disease, her death did not strike anyone as suspicious, and at the time I kept my thoughts to myself. The doctors, who had seen such cases before, only remarked on her age: at the time of her death she was thirty-five years old.

40. For a long time I tried to write here something of my grief, how I dealt with it, what I learned. I filled pages. I deleted them all. There is nothing I feel capable of saying.

41. Wilhelm was fascinated by the centrifuges used to collect cultured cells for immunology research. During her sessions with Dr. Sharma, Régine recounted Wilhelm’s description of the colours forming inside a single conical tube. She explained:

“The basic concept is that if you spin something really fast, the denser components will go to the outermost areas. You load a small tube with some of your cell suspension, and to get the cells you want you put it into the centrifuge and spin it for however long at whatever speed the protocol requires. At the end you have a very dense pellet of cells at the bottom of the tube, with the supernatant media above it. Afterwards you remove the supernatant and usually re-suspend the pellet in a much smaller volume that is workable for whatever experiment you’re doing. When you’re dealing with bacteria you use microcentrifuges, which are much smaller but spin much much faster, fifteen-thousand repetitions per minute. That’s two hundred and fifty spins a second. You don’t use them for human cells, though – it’s too fast, it would destroy them.”

Wilhelm’s area of research used centrifuges with a rate of fifteen-hundred repetitions per minute, or twenty-five spins per second. When isolating lymphocytes from a blood product, he would load the tubes into four baskets attached to a central rotor. At this point the tubes hung vertically, and they would tilt outwards as the centrifuge spun, gradually tilting downwards again as the rotor slowed and stopped. This produced a varied stratum of colours: the translucent yellow blood serum at top, filled with any soluble proteins or lipids; the whitish lymphocytes in the middle, pipetted out for analysis; and at the bottom, the red blood cells, a large viscous pellet that rippled when the tube was shaken. The last was a deep crimson, much darker than blood from the vein. Wilhelm was struck by the beauty of this hidden spectrum emerging from the prism of the centrifuge. Apparently the idea of circular motion revealing a substance’s underlying nature appealed to him.

42. On April 5, 2030, a man claiming to be Wilhelm presented himself at the NSW Gallery’s information desk. The man told the receptionist, Stephen Summers, that the artwork would soon be ready, and that it was imperative that the Gallery exhibit it once it was finished. If this proved impossible, they would have to assist him in finding some other channel to alert the world of the artwork’s existence. Summers, attempting to humor the man – who looked to be in his early thirties – told him that Wilhelm had not been seen for twenty years and would now be significantly older. Undaunted, the man offered to be photographed with Summers so that his appearance could be checked against photographs of Wilhelm. Summers consented, and another receptionist photographed them together. The man then thanked Summers and left. Unsurprisingly, few took this incident seriously, with most regarding it as an unsuccessful publicity stunt perpetrated by the Gallery. It drew only a single brief newspaper mention.30

43. In late April of that year I made my own visit to the Gallery to speak with Summers in person. After assuring him that I was seeking information only for my own satisfaction, he agreed to discuss his meeting with the man claiming to be Wilhelm. He described the man’s bearing, his tone of voice and then he showed me the photograph of the visitor, who does bear an uncanny resemblance to Wilhelm – not just his facial features, but also his clothes, as if the man had modelled his wardrobe on what Wilhelm wore twenty years before. However, this in itself says nothing; old clothes are easy to come by, and photos can be digitally altered. What interested me more was the man’s conversation with Summers. Apart from asking the Gallery for support, he had briefly described his progress with the artwork. He was as vague as Wilhelm had been, but Summers recalled him saying:

“It isn’t finished yet. It hasn’t finished assembling itself. The trick is that I don’t assemble it, it assembles itself. I only arrange it, and then it arranges me. I stand still, and it moves around me.”

44. I have with me countless photographs and videos of Régine, a fragmented record of our time together. I have grown used to the pictures, which no longer affect me as they once did. It is only the videos that trouble me. In them I can see Régine’s face from different angles, her adjusting her hair, moving to the centre of the frame, smiling into the camera held by my younger self. It is painful but I keep watching; I know that I was happy then. I cannot believe that those young people – I can call them that now – are gone. It seems more plausible to me that they are still alive somewhere, that they never became us but kept living, making the choices we did not, moving along in some other direction.

45. Régine once told me that she believed in angels, but not an afterlife.

46. If there is no afterlife, then I will not meet Régine again. Still, it seems to me that there is some form of survival after death. I have often felt presences – I would not call them ghosts. An example: I remember meeting Régine in Luna Park one weekend when I had known her for only a year. It was the middle of autumn and dusk was falling around us. We had been through the Crystal Palace, the Funhouse and now we were tired. As we rested by the harbour I felt Régine becoming distant. At these times I usually said nothing, but now I asked her what was wrong. She told me she had just remembered coming here with Wilhelm some years before. As she spoke his name I felt as if someone was standing behind us. I turned, but there was no one there. When I looked back I saw that Régine was crying. I made all sorts of promises then: that I would find Wilhelm, no matter how long it took and make him explain everything. Régine did not respond. At that moment I felt that Wilhelm was present, physically present behind us.

47. In this way, Régine is becoming more real to me even as I move further away from her in time. I often wake and expect to find her next to me; at other times I can swear that she has just left the room or is just about to enter. As I walk to King’s Cross Station I would not be surprised to look up and find her waiting for me in a cafe, troubled that I am late.

48. After I die, I imagine that I will be present at any moment in which someone remembers me. I do not intend this in an obvious, sentimental sense, but rather a literal one. What would a consciousness comprised of these instants be like, a consciousness stretched across time like a string of pearls? What would such a consciousness, if it could be seen, manifest as? Wilhelm’s teenage notebook is full of this kind of speculation.

49. If I were to create an artwork, what would my medium be?

50. In 2014 Régine and I went on holiday to Melbourne. We started with a tour of the city – Ligon Street and Federation Square, the Carlton and Fitzroy Gardens – and then headed south, through Geelong, down Great Ocean Road. Even before we reached the coast I felt as if we were moving towards some great extremity. On either side of the road trees crowded around us, their massed rows rising out of sight. The ferns, the canopies of eucalyptus and beech myrtle, seemed fragments of even older forests that had flowered in the eons before human life. The towns we passed through had a quaintness to them but not of the ordinary country kind; rather it was as if, by existing this close to the expanse of the ocean, their perspective had been distorted by its pull: they seemed toy-like, flat and bright and empty. As we approached the edge of the continent the air sharpened with the scent of salt. The roads narrowed, the forests giving way to cliffs. Finally we came to the Twelve Apostles. Past the headlands, enormous limestone pillars rose from the water, their ranks vanishing into the horizon. There were only eight of these pillars now, the ninth having collapsed some years before, its base worn away by the waves. As we pressed close to the railing, gazing at the spaces where the fallen pillars had stood, Régine said:

“They must have lost their faith.”

I laughed and took her hand. In front of us a Chinese tourist was drawing the sun as it set. As I watched him clutching his notebook, a strange feeling came over me. I felt that I had stepped outside of time. Around me were the cliffs, the pillars, the waves beating on the rocks below, but these were things I had seen before, or would see again or was perhaps always seeing. There was no sound. Every moment stood out with perfect clarity. The horizon thinned to a single crimson line dividing sea and sky, a thread of fire stitched between two night-blue eternities. I closed my eyes and could see it moving behind the waves, brightening as it narrowed, catching the tip of the furthest pillar: a strange golden colour.

1 Archer, Carol. “Frontiers Old and New: An Interview with Robert Lean,” Australian Art Review, Issue 32, May 2011, p. 16.

2 Abbot, J. Scott.  The Enigma of Chris Wilhelm. The University of Queensland Press: Brisbane, 2020, p. 30

3 Ibid, p. 34

4 Han, Eric. Chris Wilhelm and the Art of Invisibility. Hinton Press: Melbourne, 2025, p. 75

5 Archer, p. 17

6 Romford, Kelly. “Cursed Artwork Causes Deaths of Curators” The New Metro Express (Sydney) 18 Feb. 2010: B3

7 Archer, p. 18

8 Peterson, Micah. “Gallery Mourns Double Loss.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney) 15 Feb. 2010: C5

9 Archer, p. 17

10 Peterson, C5

11 Abbot, p. 54

12 Peterson, C5

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Han, p. 82

16 Many of Régine’s statements here are taken from the transcripts of her sessions with Dr. Sharma.

17 Archer, p. 18

18 Peterson, C5

19 Romford, B3. See also: Stokes, Brett. “Art World Rocked By Deaths.” The Statesman (Sydney) 17 Feb. 2010: C3 ; Liu, Jiawa. “Curator Deaths Suicide or Murder?” Plain Street Digest (Sydney) 17 Feb. 2010: B1 ; Sayle, Jason. “Mystery Artist Linked to Critics’ Deaths” Sydney Weekly Investigator (Sydney) 18 Feb. 2010: C9, etc.

20 Han, p. 157

21 Abbot, p. 73

22 Bailey, Grayson. “An Interview with Chris Wilhelm” Sydney Weekly Investigator (Sydney) 22 Feb. 2010: C4 ; Samuels, Mark. “Stepping Outside the Box: Chris Wilhelm” n+x Vol. 12 Issue 3, March 2010, pp. 36-42 ; and Rimer, Brody. “The Devil‘s Advocate” smArtbomb! Vol 3. Issue 2, April 2010 pp.24-26

23 Abbot, p. 96

24 Ramanathan, Bhavani. “Filling the Gaps: A Conversation with Robert Lean,” Artlink, Vol. 30 Issue 2, June 2010, p. 27.

25 Abbot, p. 112

26 Ibid, p. 125

27 Han, p. 163

28 Particularly doubtful is the chapter on Wilhelm in Colin Wright’s Quantum Theology in the Age of Chaos (Neon Foetus Press: Melbourne, 2018, pp. 76-92), which, besides containing questionable grammar and a number of factual errors, implies Wilhelm and Lean’s clandestine membership in a worldwide secret society resembling the Rosicrucians, and goes on to discuss their regular visits to an obscure village in central China to receive instruction from “The Masters of Time,” whose ranks are said to contain Cagliostro, Le Comte de St. Germain, Lord Byron, H.P. Blavatsky, Austin Osman Spare, Gurdjieff, etc.

29 Abbot, p. 317

30 Hasbrouck, Matthew. “The Return of Chris Wilhelm?” The Statesman (Sydney) 7 April 2030: C2

Copyright © 2012 by Justin Isis

Justin Isis is a model, fashion designer and science fiction writer who lives in Japan and has lived in America, Australia, Italy, and various other countries. His last book was I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, and his next book is Welcome to the Arms Race. He is interested in music, ice cream, and Situationism.