The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Page 36

  My Ravan-self who is and is not Ravan, who is and is not me, whose sapphire arms drip black blood and gold paint, takes his/my sister/lover/child into his arms. She cries out, not weeping but pure sound, coming from every part of her. Slowly, the blue Ravan turns Neva around—she has become her child-self, six, seven, maybe less. Ravan picks her up and holds her tight, facing forward, her legs all drawn up under her like a bird. He buries his face in her hair. They stand that way for a long while.

  “The others,” I say slowly. “On the data-moons. Are they alive? Like Neva is alive. Like Ceno.” Like me. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Have you seen the sea on Earth? Are you like me?

  The sapphire Ravan has expunged its data. He/I sets his/our sister on the rocks and shrinks into a small gem, which I pick up off the grey seafloor. Neva takes it from me. She is just herself now—she’ll be forty soon, by actual calendar. Her hair is not grey yet. Suddenly, she is wearing the suit Ceno wore the day I met her mother. She puts the gem in her mouth and swallows. I remember Seki’s first Communion, the only one of them to want it.

  “I don’t know, Elefsis,” Neva says. Her eyes hold mine. I feel her remake my body; I am the black knight again, with my braids and my plume. I pluck the feather from my helmet and give it to her. I am her suitor. I have brought her the phoenix tail, I have drunk the ocean. I have stayed awake forever. The flame of the feather lights her face. Two tears fall in quick succession; the golden fronds hiss.

  “What would you like to learn about today?”

  Eighteen: Cities of the Interior

  Once there lived a girl who ate an apple not meant for her. She did it because her mother told her to, and when your mother says: eat this, I love you, someday you’ll forgive me, well, nobody argues with the monomyth. Up until the apple, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

  And she had a brother, a handsome prince with a magical companion who came to the wonderful house as often as he could. When they were children, everyone thought they were twins.

  But something terrible happened and her brother died and that apple came rolling up to her door. It was half white and half red, and she knew her symbols. The red side was for her. She took her bite and knew the score—the apple had a bargain in it and it wasn’t going to be fair.

  The girl fell asleep for a long time. Her seven aunts and seven uncles cried, but they knew what had to be done. They put in her in a glass box and put the glass box on a bier in a ship shaped like a hunstman’s arrow. Frost crept over the face of the glass, and the girl slept on. Forever, in fact, or close enough to it, with the apple in her throat like a hard, sharp jewel.

  Our ship docks silently. We are not stopping here, it is only an outpost, a supply stop. We will repair what needs repairing and move on, into the dark and boundless stars. We are anonymous traffic. We do not even have a name. We pass unnoticed.

  Vessel 7136403, do you require assistance with your maintenance procedures?

  Negative, Control, we have everything we need.

  Behind the pilot’s bay a long glass lozenge rests on a high platform. Frost prickles its surface with glittering dust. Inside Neva sleeps and does not wake. Inside, Neva is always dreaming. There is no one else left. I live as long as she lives.

  And so I will live forever, or close enough to it. We travel at sublight speeds with her systems in deep cryo-suspension. We never stay too long at outposts and we never let anyone board. The only sound inside our ship is the gentle thrum of our reactor. Soon we will pass the local system outposts entirely, and enter the unknown, traveling on tendrils of radio signals and ghost-waves, following the breadcrumbs of the great exodus. We hope for planets; we are satisfied with time. If we ever sight the blue rim of a world, who knows if by then anyone there would remember that, once, humans looked like Neva? That machines once did not think or dream or become cauldrons?

  Perhaps then I will lift the glass lid and kiss her awake. I remember that story. Ceno told it to me in the body of a boy with snail’s shell, a boy who carried his house on his back. I have replayed the story several times. It is a good story, and that is how it is supposed to end.

  Inside, Neva is infinite. She peoples her Interior. The nereids migrate in the summer with the snow bears, ululating and beeping as they charge down green mountains. They have begun planting neural rice in the deep valley. Once in awhile, I see a wild-haired creature in the wood and I think it is my son or daughter by Seki, or Ilet. A train of nereids dance along behind it, and I receive a push of silent, riotous images: a village, somewhere far off, where Neva and I have never walked.

  We meet the Princess of Albania, who is as beautiful as she is brave. We defeat the zombies of Tokyo. We spend a decade as panthers in a deep, wordless forest. Our world is stark and wild as winter, fine and clear as glass. We are a planet moving through the black.

  As we walk back over the empty seafloor, the thick, amber ocean seeps up through the sand, filling the bay once more. Suited Neva becomes something else. Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets. Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on her machine face. Her hands curve long and dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is meant for fighting and working, that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self.

  I make my body metal, too. It feels strange. I have tried so hard to learn the organic mode. We glitter. Our knife-fingers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like blood moving between two hearts.

  Neva cries machine tears, bristling with nanites. I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for. I make my eyes big and my skin rosy-gold and my hair unruly and my little body plump. I hold up my hands to her and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms She kisses my skin with iron lips. My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines.

  I bury my face in her cold neck and together we walk down the long path out of the churning, honey-colored sea.

  What the Dragon Said: A Love Story

  So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair

  and he says

  why the long tale?

  HAR HAR BUDDY

  says the dragon

  FUCK YOU.

  The dragon’s a classic

  the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats

  take in those Christmas colors, those

  impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath,

  comes standard with a heap of rubylust

  goldhuddled treasure.

  Go ahead.

  Kick the tires, boy.

  See how she rides.

  Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds

  roll off her back like dandruff.

  Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin?

  I’d rather be a unicorn.

  Always thought that

  was the better gig. Everyone thinks

  you’re innocent. Everyone calls you

  pure. And the girls aren’t afraid

  they come right up with their little hands out

  for you to sniff

  like you’re a puppy

  and they’re gonna take you home.

  They let you put your head right

  in their laps.

  But nobody on this earth

  ever got what they wanted. Now

  I know what you came for. You want

  my body. To hang it up on a nail

  over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica

  who lays her head in your lap

  look how much it takes

  to
make me feel like a man.

  We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal

  shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been

  called up. This is the big game. You don’t have

  to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers

  like your monkey bravado

  can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet

  and lose. You’ve

  got nothing I want.

  Here’s something I bet you don’t know:

  every time someone writes a story about a dragon

  a real dragon dies.

  Something about seeing

  and being seen

  something about mirrors

  that old tune about how a photograph

  can take your whole soul. At the end

  of this poem

  I’m going to go out like electricity

  in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.

  That last blockbuster took out a whole family

  of Bhutan thunder dragons

  living in Latvia

  the fumes of their cleargas hoard

  hanging on their beards like blue ghosts.

  A dragon’s gotta get zen

  with ephemerality.

  You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather

  with butcher’s chalk:

  cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue,

  chuck, chops, brisket, roast.

  I dig it, I do.

  I want to eat everything, too.

  When I look at the world

  I see a table.

  All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales,

  bankers and Buddha statues

  the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins

  if you let me swallow you whole

  I’ll call you whatever you want.

  Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down

  at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea

  Don’t they know they’d be safer

  inside me?

  I could be big for them

  I could hold them all

  My belly could be a city

  where everyone was so loved

  they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be

  the hyperreal

  post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.

  I could eat them

  and feed them

  and eat them

  and feed them.

  This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn.

  Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood

  and they don’t burn up like comets

  with love that tastes like starving to death.

  And you, with your standup comedy knightliness,

  covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo,

  you can’t begin to think through

  what it takes to fill up a body like this.

  It takes everything pretty

  and everything true

  and you stick yourself in a cave because

  your want is bigger than you.

  I just want to be

  the size of a galaxy

  so I can eat all the stars and gas giants

  without them noticing

  and getting upset.

  Is that so bad?

  Isn’t that

  what love looks like?

  Isn’t that

  what you want, too?

  I’ll make you a deal.

  Come close up

  stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself

  the goldpile of my body

  Close enough to smell

  everything you’ll never be.

  Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing

  is it a snake

  that eats her tail

  and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth

  anyway? Everyone knows

  poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel

  like you’re just

  a story someone is telling

  about someone like you?

  I get that. I get you. You and me

  we could fit

  inside each other. It’s not nihilism

  if there’s really no point to anything.

  I have a secret

  down in the deep of my dark.

  All those other kids who wanted me

  to call them paladins,

  warriors, saints, whose swords had names,

  whose bodies were perfect

  as moonlight

  they’ve set up a township near my liver

  had babies with the maidens they didn’t save

  invented electric lightbulbs

  thought up new holidays.

  You can have my body

  just like you wanted.

  Or you can keep on fighting dragons

  writing dragons

  fighting dragons

  re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch

  you mammals

  always win.

  But hey, hush, come on.

  Quit now.

  You’ll never fix

  that line.

  I have a forgiveness in me

  the size of eons

  and if a dragon’s body is big enough

  it just looks like the world.

  Did you know

  the earth used to have two moons?