Utopianism in Postcolonial Women's Science Fiction Impossible Things

Home , Impossible Things, Redwood and Wildfire, The Blazing World, The Calcutta Chromosome, Zoo City

Possible Things: Utopianism in Postcolonial Women’s Science Fiction

and Impossible Things: A Novel

Lisa Dowdall

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts and Media

UNSW Arts and Social Sciences

March 2016

Acknowledgements

I would first like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisors, Prof Bill Ashcroft and Dr Stephanie Bishop, for their support of both the creative and theoretical components of this thesis. Their patience, expertise and generosity helped me accomplish things I didn’t think I was capable of. Their guidance was invaluable not only in the writing of this thesis but also in learning to think, read and write in new and exciting ways. I could not imagine two better advisers or mentors for this project.

Besides my supervisors, I’d like to thank the many people who provided their feedback on various drafts of the novel and the dissertation. Tanya Thaweeskulchai influenced my work in ways that extend far beyond the parameters of this dissertation, and her friendship is one of the most precious things I take away from this doctoral experience. Prue Gibson and Jayne Chapman offered much-needed comments on the novel and the dissertation respectively. I would also like to thank Anne Brewster for the rigorous feedback she gave on the third chapter on indigenous science fiction, along with Emily Maguire and Margo Lanagan for their formative feedback on early drafts of the novel. Thank you also to Roanna Gonsalves, Jessica Ford, Melanie Robson, Sameera Karam, Shaun Bell and Phoebe Macrossan for all the writing workshops.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, friends and family, who supported me through all the challenges of the past four years, from helping me move house (three times) to supplying me with gallons of tea.

(And for Buddy, of course: thank you.)

Table of contents

Abstract 5 Possible Things: Utopianism in Postcolonial 8 Women’s Science Fiction Introduction 9 Chapter 1 27 Treasured Strangers: Reproduction, Biopolitics and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ Series Chapter 2 65 Spatial Palimpsest in South African Science Fiction: Imagining Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Rachel Zadok’s Sister-Sister Chapter 3 101 Science Fiction as Indigenous Survivance: The Multi- Species Futures of Ambelin Kwaymullina, Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright Conclusion 139 Works cited 141 Impossible Things: A Novel 157 Glossary 361

Abstract

While science fiction has historically been associated with masculinist, rationalist and colonial discourse, postcolonial science fiction by women writers grapples with the genre’s key tropes, including race, gender, species and technology, to shift its canonical and geographic centre.

This dissertation analyses science fiction (sf) by postcolonial women writers using Ernst Bloch’s theory of utopianism. It contends that postcolonial women writers create counter-narratives of the future, breaking down gendered and oppositional Western dichotomies – such as human and nonhuman, tradition and modernity, and nature and technology – that pervade sf. These counter-narratives are a utopian praxis that presents heterogeneous ‘ethnoscapes’ (Lavender), asserting the presence, sovereignty and futurity of postcolonial others.

The dissertation focuses on the work of six key writers: first, it addresses the intersections of biotechnology and capital in Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ trilogy (1987-1989); second, it discusses literary geography in Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) and Rachel Zadok’s Sister-Sister (2013); and third, it explores inter-species ontologies in indigenous sf, focusing on Ambelin Kwaymullina’s ‘Tribe’ series (2012- 2015), Ellen van Neerven’s ‘Water’ (2014) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013). All the authors reject the absence or silence of ‘ex-centric subjects’ (Baccolini) in sf, offering images that disturb the present and propel the future.

The dissertation informs the creative component of the thesis. Impossible Things is a dystopian fantasy novel set between two worlds: Kalan, where energy lords force magicians, known as elantar, to reap the non-renewable energy from ecosystems for private power networks; and Maradek, where art is a religious practice that informs socio-political life. Ada is a fourteen-

year-old elantar who risks being enslaved by the energy lords in Kalan. Her father, Pitr, is an artist who finds work in Maradek and hopes to earn enough money and prestige to bring his family across the sea. When the Kalani energy lords cut ties with Maradek, Ada and her mother risk the voyage on their own to avoid being separated from Pitr forever. While Pitr struggles to convince the Maradeki that, as an outsider, his art offers valid perspectives, Ada discovers new forms of magic that challenge the traditions of both art and elantry.

Possible Things

Utopianism in Postcolonial Women’s Science Fiction

Introduction

From the sand-bogged swamp of an Australian coastal community to the roadside diner of a drought-stricken Johannesburg: science fiction by women from postcolonial situations reveals the fragile boundaries between the present and the future. As Donna Haraway states, “the boundary between science fiction and reality is an optical illusion” (Simians 149), not least for those whose material experience encompasses the scenarios of conquest, displacement, alienation and apocalypse characteristic of a genre that arose alongside “the most fervent imperial expansion” of the West in the nineteenth century (Rieder 3).

While science fiction (sf) has historically been associated with masculinist, imperialist and techno-scientific discourse, postcolonial sf by women grapples with the genre’s key themes to shift the canonical, geographic and demographic centre of the genre. Such work asserts the futurity of postcolonial others who are often rendered silent or invisible in popular sf. Women writing postcolonial sf engage in a utopian praxis that radically reimagines the future to assert the presence and the sovereignty of those usually ignored or subjugated by sf. In doing so, they break down gendered and hierarchical dualisms – such as human and non-human, tradition and modernity, nature and technology – that reinforce colonial ideology.

And yet sf is also a genre that explores possibility and alterity. Scholars from Darko Suvin to Fredric Jameson have demonstrated how sf, by extrapolating from the present to imagine different futures (whether utopian or dystopian in nature), both reflects on and critiques the present. For Suvin, sf is the literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ in which “the aliens – utopians, monsters, or simply different strangers – are a mirror” (Suvin 5). This mirror not only reflects but, more importantly, transforms reality – “the mirror is a crucible” (5). In this way, sf serves the utopian function of imagining the world otherwise. It presents “images of desire”

and “figures of hope” in an “open space of opposition” (Moylan 1-2) and holds open the future as a space of radical difference, saying “what cannot yet be said” (Moylan 39). This differs from the literary utopias, exemplified by Thomas More, which propose blueprints for perfect societies. While blueprint utopias such as More’s Utopia (1516), Tomasso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) serve an important critical function, sf is characterised not only by critique but also by the imagination of possibility beyond the closure and stasis of a perfect world. Sf therefore situates the future as a point of departure rather than a finished product.

At the same time, Jameson argues, utopia is intimately entwined with ideology, to the extent that it is almost impossible to think outside of the present. For Jameson, sf does not offer images of the future so much as reveal the “incapacity to imagine the future” (“Progress” 153). Such tensions between ideological closure and utopian striving continue to inform representations of race and gender in sf, and reflect the difficulties of imagining the future outside of the social, political and cultural constructions of empire. While this ideological closure often manifests in sf as dystopia, Lyman Tower Sargent suggests that contemporary dystopias, which usually feature “at least one eutopian enclave” and the persistent hope that the dystopia will be overcome (“Eutopias” 222), should be regarded as “critical dystopias” because they reject the hopelessness of the traditional dystopia or anti-utopia.1 The persistence of hope is a defining feature of contemporary sf and dystopian literature. Because “the ambiguous, open endings of these novels maintain the utopian impulse within the work” (Baccolini and Moylan 7), critical dystopias resist closure.

This dissertation analyses sf by women from postcolonial nations through the lens of Ernst Bloch’s utopian theory. Focusing on the work of African-

1 Anti-utopia differs from critical dystopia in that it rejects utopian thinking entirely.

American writer Octavia Butler, South African writers Lauren Beukes and Rachel Zadok, and Australian indigenous writers Ambelin Kwaymullina, Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright, it argues that postcolonial women’s sf explores the possibilities and radical differences offered by imagining feminist or woman-centred worlds. This work is extrapolative and transformative, forcing readers to “see the differences of an elsewhere” and reflect critically on their own social reality (Baccolini 165). In its compulsion to embrace difference and imagine otherness, postcolonial women’s sf is utopian – a form of “social dreaming” (Sargent ‘Introduction’ 1) rather than a fixed ideal state – that, firstly, resists the erasure of women and other “ex-centric” subjects (Baccolini 166) from the future, and, secondly, illuminates what does not yet exist or what is not yet possible. This illumination is what Bloch terms Vor-schein, or anticipatory consciousness, enabling “latent and potential materials to assume their own unique forms” (Zipes xx).

While it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to review the work of women sf writers from other postcolonial contexts such as India and the Caribbean, the case studies selected are integral to a rapidly growing and vibrant body of global sf that challenges the normativity of the genre’s reading and writing practices. Through the polyphonic perspectives of their female characters, all the authors discussed in this dissertation explore the complex and shifting terrain of postcolonial futures that reveal the myriad possibilities for, and challenges of, rearranging the present.

Race, gender and otherness in sf

Race has often been metaphorised in sf – for example, in first contact2 or lost race3 stories – while women have usually been either silent, or absent

2 First contact refers to the first meeting between humans and alien lifeforms and is one of sf’s most common themes. Examples of first contact novels include H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Carl Sagan’s

from the genre altogether, and, when writing sf themselves, frequently assume male or gender-ambiguous pseudonyms.4 And yet sf offers the hope of liberation – of escaping the racial and gendered constructs of the present and productively transforming them to suggest new ways of existing in relation to others in the future. Race and gender have also been of great interest to sf scholars. From Afrofuturist to indigenous sf, recent studies have increasingly focused on how the burgeoning diversity of people reading and writing sf expands the genre’s critical function.

This interest is perhaps unsurprising, given sf’s relationships to colonialism and empire. Some of the earliest and most well-known sf texts, such as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), narrate the discovery of new worlds, epic struggles against alien invasion, and the conquest of the old world order in the service of new empires. As Brian Ash observes:

The treatment of alien life forms in the early ‘space operas’ was reminiscent of the attitude of the American settlers to the native Red Indians. It was identical, in fact, to the arrogance of a supposedly superior race typified by Wells’ Martians. If an alien stood in the way, it was blasted into the ground – and how should it have been otherwise? (73)

John Rieder ties the emergence of British and American sf to nineteenth century colonialism and, although sf did not necessarily legitimise

Contact (1985). It is also very popular in film, e.g. The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise 1951), E.T.: The Extra-terrestrial (1982) and Independence Day (Emmerich 1996). 3 In lost race stories, explorers typically discover previously unknown races or species, sometimes through time travel. Lost race novels include Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). More contemporary examples are Michael Crichton’s Congo (1980) and Anthony Nansen’s Deep Time (2015). Lost race novels are typically set in ‘exotic’ or as-yet-unexplored parts of the world, including Africa, South America, Asia and even Antarctica (e.g. Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011)). 4 Prominent examples include Alice Sheldon writing as James Tiptree, Jr., Alice Norton writing as Andre Norton, C. J. Cherryh and C. L. Moore.

imperialism, he argues that it confirmed a strong sense of the ‘natural’ and the ‘exotic’ that still persists in Western sf today. This fascination with the ‘other’ is at the heart of the genre and brings it within the orbit of postcolonial theory. As Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal argue, the function of the ‘other’ in both postcolonial and sf writing is to wrangle difference into a larger norm whereby the image of the other is used to reify the self and justify the “exploitation and annihilation of peoples, whether red, black, or green” (10). Raja, Ellis and Nandi also identify a natural connection between sf and postcolonial studies – both address “questions of temporality, space, and existence” as well as “questions of the ‘other’ – human, machine, cyborg – and the nature of . . . utopias and dystopias” (9).

While there is an increasing amount of sf by both white and non-white writers that interrogates colonial tropes and resists subjection of the other, reading sf is still, to a large extent, an oppositional exercise. Reading sf “exposes something that colonialism imposes” (Rieder 15), with the “exotic other” – as alien, member of a lost race, or android, for example – presented as a “distorted projection of the observer” (68), who is assumed to be a white male. The exotic other therefore becomes the “literalization of the racist ideological fantasy that guides much colonial practice” (106). Damien Broderick believes that even though telling the stories of others is sf’s remit, too often sf “writes, rather, the definition of the same, as other” (51) and thereby ignores issues of race in constructions of the future.

Judith Leggatt states that while sf’s alternative realities and its representations of otherness resonate with postcolonial concerns, too often sf “ignores the problems that exist between different human cultural groups or perpetuates the prejudices of the dominant culture” (108). By depicting humans as homogeneous and projecting otherness onto aliens or artificial life, sf fails to interrogate racism by “making racial differences appear unimportant” (108). Leggatt cites Robert Heinlein’s Starship

Troopers and the ‘Star Trek’ series as examples of future societies that assume an integration of race, gender and species (109), side-stepping any critical engagement with the issue of race. She states that when race does play a role in future worlds, it often “reinscribes the stereotypes and biases of the society in which they are created” (109). Similarly, De Witt Douglas Kilgore argues that the issue of race cannot “simply wither away” (17) in sf, but must be productively transformed. One of the genre’s key challenges is, therefore, to move beyond simply metaphorising race and creating “endless iterations of colour-blind futures” (18) that assume the end of race.

Postcolonial sf engages meaningfully with race as one of the ways in which the future is constructed and imagined. Race signifies more than colour and speaks to the way in which the ‘other’ is constructed as the inferior referent in the hierarchised dualisms of male/female, civilised/uncivilised, tradition/modernity and self/other. Postcolonial sf is, therefore, what Kilgore calls an “engine of difference” through which writers such as Butler, Beukes and Kwaymullina use the genre’s “penchant for racial play” (21) to experiment with how race might function in future scenarios, both on the levels of biology and sociology.

Postcolonial sf explores the possibilities of reimagining race and critiques the racial fantasies or elisions of the sf canon. Sf writers who experience American and European imperialism from the other side – for example, as victims, displaced or enslaved persons, or alien others – move beyond the image of the other as self-same. They appropriate the speculative techniques of sf to critique imperialist paradigms and stereotypes that suggest “only the technohistorical centre will have a future” (Csicsery- Ronay 237). Postcolonial sf writers appropriate sf precisely for its role in inscribing hegemonic discourse. In the introduction to So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction, a collection of short fiction by writers from nations “consigned to the absolute past of first-world

industrial progress” (Smith 5), Nalo Hopkinson states that postcolonial sf writers create

stories that take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things. (9)

At the same time, postcolonial sf writers challenge the “global disparity in the production of speculative narrative” (Smith 5) by bringing to light the myriad futures emanating from the global periphery. Their interventions grasp sf’s critical capacities and transform its tropes into polysemous figurations of utopian possibility, or what Eric D. Smith terms “new maps of hope” (6).

Black utopian writing has also sought to map out new futures. Ingrid Thaler writes that while scholars have rediscovered and studied black speculative texts within the context of Afrofuturist or postcolonial sf, black utopian writing is often overlooked. Thaler points out that at the height of popularity of Anglophone utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890), which assume exclusively white futures, several African-American utopias had already been published. Indeed, the first African-American utopia – Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862), which imagines the possibility of a black utopia in Africa – predates Bellamy’s seminal text by almost two decades. Other black utopias include Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1901-1903) and Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904). M. Giulia Fabi contends that black utopias “articulated a tradition that belongs to utopia as a genre and is also distinctly African American” (qtd.

in Thaler 12), leading Thaler to suggest that a revisionary literary history that includes the recovery and interpretation of these texts is necessary. While such a study is beyond the scope of this dissertation, it is important to recognise the historical diversity and breadth of utopian and sf writing. The critical imaginative function of imagining alternative societies is not exclusively a Western compulsion, but a flexible mode that can be used by writers on the periphery to critique the historical-material conditions of otherness, wherever they occur.

This exploration of difference also drives women’s sf and utopias. By interrogating race and gender, postcolonial sf writers create the potential for the “authentic shift” that Raymond Williams sees as the power of sf – “a crisis of possibility; a reworking, in imagination, of all forms and conditions” (212). While women have always had a presence in sf and utopian writing,5 the majority of speculative fiction by women has been produced in the West, especially prior to the 1980s. One notable early exception is Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). Hussain, a Muslim feminist living in British India, imagines a gender role- reversal with men remaining home and observing purdah while women use technology to reduce labour and improve farming, transport and other social systems to the extent that they only work two hours a day.

5 Whether the inception of sf is with the creation of Frankenstein’s monster by Mary Shelley in 1818, as suggested by Brian Aldiss in Trillion Year Spree, or goes back as far as the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality (2100-2000 BC), as argued by James Gunn, women have often speculated about the future. Aside from Shelley, prominent early examples include Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy! (1827) and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1880- 1). At the same time, feminist utopias were also being published, such as Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889). The feminist utopias of the twentieth century are the best-known, especially Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).

The advent of the New Wave6 in sf saw the inclusion of new critical perspectives in the genre, in conversation with second-wave feminism. Many female sf writers emerged in the 1970s, including C. J. Cherryh, Vonda McIntyre, Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Marge Piercy, Anne McCaffrey and Joan Vinge. Many of these writers blurred the lines between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sf.7 However, until the publication of Octavia Butler’s first sf novel in the Patternist series, Patternmaster (1976), little attention was paid to the work of black women writers and the ways in which they intervene into a white feminist sf.

Together with Samuel R. Delany, Butler was among the first and best- known African-American writers to draw attention, through sf, to the ways in which the enduring legacies of race, colonialism, slavery and separatism shape the present and inform assumptions about the future. While there was certainly sf and utopian writing produced by African-American and other non-white women before this period, the publication of Butler’s groundbreaking work inspired a range of authors from America, the Caribbean, India and Africa, including Nalo Hopkinson, Buchi Emecheta, Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston, Vandana Singh, Nnedi Okorafor and Opal Palmer Adisa. Their work explores the intertwined issues of colonialism,

6 The New Wave encompasses the 1960s and 1970s and is characterised by a dramatic break from the preoccupations of pulp sf, greater formal experimentation, and a broader diversity of writers participating in the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin describes the New Wave as “an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing” (18).

7 From freeing women from the socio-biological demands of motherhood through the use of technology in Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time to imagining matriarchal societies that reinterpret European fairy tales in Vinge’s The Snow Queen, New Wave feminist sf disrupts the gendered construction of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science. Feminist sf rejects the conceptualisation of technology, science and empire as progressive, rational and masculine – in short, ‘hard’ science – in contrast to the ‘soft’ sciences of anthropology, linguistics and social theory, which are positioned as feminine. Patricia Melzer states that feminist sf undermines the dualism of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sf, investigating the ways in which the distinctions between the technological and the social or anthropological sciences can be blurred to promote more fluid and changeable gender roles, especially by liberating women increasingly from both the social and biological responsibilities of motherhood.

race and gender, and offers counterpoints to the predominantly white utopias and sf written by women prior to the 1980s, rejecting the presumed universality of much New Wave feminist sf. Since, as Suniti Namjoshi notes, “not all women experience the same oppression in the same ways” (qtd. in Pordzik 111), their work is critical in presenting multiple responses to the “patriarchal tactics” that, even in sf, continue to relegate women to the “margins of critical consciousness” (111).

Postcolonial women’s sf contributes to the work of liberal feminist writers in collapsing gendered (and racial) binaries that align the masculine with the rational, the modern and the technological, and the female with the traditional, the superstitious and the biological. In her work on reason- centred culture, Val Plumwood argues that reason is an “arrogant and insensitive” form (Environmental 5) that treats the ecological world – which is aligned with nature, emotion and embodiment – as inferior and disposable. She states:

in the rationalist historic imaginary, women and other ‘lesser beings’ are the Others of reason, which is treated as the province of elite men who are above the base material sphere of daily life and are entitled to transcend it because of their greater share in Reason. It is not only women that have been constructed as oppositional to western rationality, culture and philosophy, but also the slave, the animal, and the barbarian, all associated with the body and the whole contrasted sphere of physicality and materiality . . . From this narrative we derive the myths – still strongly persisting – of women’s more emotional and unstable nature, as well as the contemporary myths of an invincible and heroic male-coded techno-reason that will solve our current problems and wrest a shining future from the jaws of crisis. (19)

In response, postcolonial women’s sf embraces flexible, hybrid identities that disrupt these gendered and racial dualisms. This hybridity is also a marker of postcolonial utopias that “overstep geographical and ontological boundaries” to create kaleidoscopic images of reality which experiment with the “factual and fantastic, terrestrial and occult, or encyclopedic and anti-verisimilar” (D. Wright 182). By asserting hybrid identities and syncretic modes of seeing and being, postcolonial sf breaks down the Eurocentric and diametrically opposed categories of tradition/modernity, reflecting the political culture of many postcolonial nations. For example, Kudzai Pfuwai Matereke and Pascah Mungwini suggest that magic, witchcraft and the supernatural influence everyday life in postcolonial Africa, providing people with the “conceptual terrain for constructing, considering and contesting the multiple manifestations of modernity that positively flourish at the crossroads of local and global worlds” (Sanders qtd. in Matereke and Mungwini 428). Thus, while colonial states have often been depicted as sites of catastrophe requiring the intervention of Western systems of government and rationality to combat native primitivism and savagery, postcolonial sf highlights the ways in which this is a gendered construction that whitewashes the hybrid belief systems that inform postcolonial modernity.

Postcolonial women’s sf takes on chameleon-like forms to reflect this hybridity, bringing together elements of sf, fantasy, magic realism, fable or fairy tale, crime/noir and horror. Suparno Banerjee considers the generic elasticity of postcolonial sf writers such as Amitav Ghosh as a mode of resistance. He states that the subaltern preserves its identity through refusing to join normative colonial discourse, including literary conventions, and projects its uniqueness through subversive forms (62). Such fictions function as a counterculture of modernity (Gilroy) and also suggest new ways of seeing, being and representing.

The postcolonial woman’s body is often central to these alternative ontologies. While experimenting with the body through writing is also a (white) feminist technique, and one that many sf writers have tackled – perhaps most notably Margaret Atwood in contemporary sf literature, but also Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy – postcolonial women writers offer new perspectives on how coloured bodies are used to produce difference. Butler, for example, draws attention to how the black female body is exoticised, sexualised, estranged or otherwise subjected to white control, but she also positions the body as a site of transformation precisely because it is a discursive construct and not a biological one. Gregory Hampton suggests that the body is a “blank canvas . . . constituted more by history and experience than the materials of flesh and bone” (25). As such, postcolonial women can write the body in ways that transform how it is biologically and socially constructed, positioning it as a site of fluid identities that are constantly being renegotiated in relation to others. Postcolonial women writing sf create what Elizabeth Grosz refers to as “textualized bodies” situated within a “cultural matrix” (qtd. in Hampton 62), while Patricia Melzer draws attention back to the discursive power of the body and its gender roles, which “do not develop from ‘biological facts’ but are produced through discourse” (83). Bodies, therefore, do not determine gender, but how they are interpreted does.

Postcolonial sf authors such as Butler undermine dualistic thinking about black bodies and women’s bodies, and reveal how the postcolonial body is a flexible construct upon which difference is projected. Because of this, the body is also a place where difference can be productively transformed to create new interpretations of gender and sexuality. Sherryl Vint argues that certain bodily characteristics are “coded as ‘outside’ human identity, while others might be thought of as equally marked and specific” and are therefore taken as universal (Bodies 11). Postcolonial women’s sf experiments with the monstrous bodies of women, aliens, animals, cyborgs and others to critique the ways in which specific qualities are attributed to

bodies inside and outside this universality. In doing so, they resist the colonisation and regulation of particular bodies, and offer new perspectives on one of sf’s most common figures – that of the posthuman – by exposing how the ‘human’ is constantly being constructed and performed. The creation of postcolonial bodies in women’s sf evokes Bruce Sterling’s description of cyberpunk characters as “hopeful monsters” (4) in their potential to dissolve the dichotomous constructs of the colonial imaginary.

All six authors discussed in this dissertation position the future as a site of struggle but also of immense potential and possibility. Using sf, they reveal the (dis)array of postcolonial futures that emanate from the global periphery and assert their presence in ways that engage the utopian function of sf and rewrite the genre’s colonial tropes.

Utopian thinking in postcolonial sf

Utopian studies have primarily focused on Western culture, concentrating on literary or blueprint utopias, intentional communities and sf. However, utopias exist outside the American and European centres. In a special issue of Utopian Studies, scholars identify a range of utopias from beyond the Western tradition that refute Krishan Kumar’s assertion that “nothing like the western utopia and utopian traditions exist in any non-western or non-Christian culture” (424). Although Jacqueline Dutton and Sargent acknowledge that such utopias may differ from the Western paradigm of utopia, they nonetheless assert that utopia existed in a range of cultures before those cultures were exposed to the Western model (2). In contrast to the best-known utopias of the Western tradition, from Hesiod and Plato to Edward Bellamy and William Morris, non-Western utopias offer alternative takes on the ideal society. These include Tao Qian’s (AD 365- 427) Daoist paradise in Peach Blossom Spring and Chinese intellectual Cai Yuanpei’s ‘New Year’s Dream’ (1904) (see Li); and Ibn Tufayl’s Treatise of

the Alive, Son of the Awake, on the Secrets of Oriental Wisdom, written in the Middle Ages, and the Iranian philosopher Abu Nasr Farabi’s (ca. 870- 950) The Virtuous City (see Lauri).

Irrespective of culture or location, Bloch identifies a utopian impulse in art and literature, premised on the universal qualities of hope and anticipation. For Bloch, utopianism is an ongoing, dialectical process that recognises that “the world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something,” and this something is an intention towards fulfilment of “a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness” (Principle 1 18). The ‘something’ takes innumerable forms and is constantly changing, shaped by not-yet-conscious wish-images that reveal the lack or the void of material reality and strive towards the “furthest and brightest horizon” (75). Utopianism, therefore, cannot be reduced to a literary blueprint, an intentional community or a political treatise, although these forms may contain the utopian impulse. Bloch states that:

to limit the utopian to the Thomas More variety . . . would be like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed. Indeed, the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary . . . to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia. (Principle 1 5)

Jameson reiterates that utopia is no longer a singular proposition for the good life, but rather “the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place,” a “representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness” (Archaeologies xii). Reading postcolonial women’s sf through Bloch’s theory of utopianism reveals the myriad manifestations of desire and anticipation that fuel diverse

imaginings of the future, especially given Western presumptions about colour, gender and species in relation to that future. Miguel Abensour sees utopianism as the “education of desire,” which can uncover “the issues of social alterity [that] appear in a thousand different forms” (qtd. in Nadir 47). Postcolonial women’s sf refocuses and reinforces the self-reflexivity that utopia demands while also opening up never-before-seen horizons that reveal the short-sightedness of white, male desire.

This striving towards alterity is premised on hope, which Bloch believes is the force that impels utopian thinking. For Bloch, hopelessness is “the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs” (Principle 1 5). Hope of what is to come is “a basic feature of human consciousness” as well as “a basic determination within objective reality as a whole” (7). Although hope can be disappointed or misplaced, real hope for the ‘In-Front-of-Us’ is not just wishful thinking. Hope is not “endless striving; rather, it wants to see the merely immediate and thus unpossessed nature of self-location and being-here finally mediated, illuminated and fulfilled” (16).

Most importantly, hope is a refutation of the Not – at once the abyss and the desire to escape the abyss. ‘Not’ is the starting point from which the Not-Yet-Conscious evolves – a concept Bloch derives from the Freudian unconscious. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch describes the Not-Yet- Conscious as a future orientation expressed through daydreams and other unconscious acts. This kind of future thinking, or ‘forward dawning,’ contains the seeds of the New, the distant horizon that utopianism reaches towards. The Not-Yet-Conscious is anticipation, driven by desire for the ‘Real-Possible’ – it is “the means through which human beings form themselves, conceive questions about themselves, and portray the possibility of attaining their objectives” (Zipes xxxii).

As a vessel of hope and Not-Yet-Conscious desire, postcolonial sf is a utopian expression that clearly contains the revelatory and transformative material Bloch identifies as central to the utopian locus of art and literature. Perhaps most importantly, postcolonial sf reveals an anticipatory consciousness, or Vor-schein8, that grasps the necessity of otherness. This anticipatory consciousness illuminates the frontiers of reality and projects hope and desire beyond. Jameson conceives of anticipatory consciousness as the “dimly vibrating meaning” (Marxism 145) within a text that grasps the possibility of difference. It is a glimmer of the New that begins in hope and works through the Not-Yet-Conscious towards the Real-Possible.

At the same time, the futures imagined by postcolonial sf are still strongly rooted in the colonial contexts to which they respond. Jessica Langer points out that in postcolonial sf, dystopia is always thrown into a tangled arrangement with utopia (185) because the conditions for a utopia are exclusive – “the utopia, in its perfection, must exclude the imperfect” which constitutes the peripheral other (172). Joan Gordon goes so far as to identify an interdependence between “utopia, genocide and the alien Other” (205) and suggests that difference is not tolerated by utopia – “the alien cannot become familiar enough to cross the trench into utopia” (210). She interprets this absence or intolerance of difference as closely linked to a genocidal agenda which is, for the perpetrators, a “utopian project” (205). Postcolonial sf therefore rejects the static and uniform utopia, and adopts subversive and hybrid techniques that rely upon a utopian anticipatory consciousness, while at the same time revealing the ways in

8 Vor-schein has been interpreted differently by a range of theorists. For Jack Zipes, it means ‘anticipatory illumination’; for Wayne Hudson, ‘preappearance’; and for Fredric Jameson, ‘ontological anticipation’ (Marxism). This dissertation works with ‘anticipatory consciousness’ because it recognises the deliberate and critical awareness postcolonial authors use to craft their future-images. It also grasps that postcolonial sf imagines the ways in which latent hope can be transferred into actuality through anticipation in acts of “willed transformation” (Williams 203).

which colonial ideology strives to render unthinkable the world beyond its own image.

In its anticipatory consciousness, postcolonial sf stimulates oppositional ways of thinking and opens up imaginative space to explore possibility. Working on Bloch’s theory of utopianism, this dissertation now turns to case studies of postcolonial women sf writers to explore how the utopian desire for alterity underpins radically different images of the future not contemplated by Western sf.

Outline

The dissertation focuses on the work of six key writers from American, South African and Australian contexts. Firstly, it addresses the intersections of biotechnology and capital in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-1989) and argues that, as the first prominent female African- American sf writer, Butler offers a new vision of a women’s dystopia. The trilogy critiques the history of women’s reproductive slavery in the United States and the representation of black women as breeders or negligent mothers in a way that also draws attention to the ongoing colonisation of poor black and brown bodies through contemporary tissue economies. By contrasting Lilith’s relationship to the Oankali with the Resisters’ desire for autonomy, Butler offers a utopian vision of human evolution that is not tied to genetic determinism; instead, she insists that the ‘posthuman’ is contingent upon productive disruptions in fluid worlds of ecological catastrophe and renewal.

Secondly, the dissertation discusses novels by two South African sf writers – Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) and Rachel Zadok’s Sister-Sister (2013). Both write Johannesburg as a palimpsest that reveals the spatial dimensions of the city’s class, race and gender conflicts. Their literary geographies explore the ‘vertical dimension’ of the city – the ways in which its stratification along race lines, for example, is narrated through its

urban layers, from subways to skyscrapers – and find that their female protagonists are able to adapt to and even repurpose aspects of the city’s geography in their transgressional movements.

Thirdly, the dissertation turns to local indigenous authors Ambelin Kwaymullina, Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright. It discusses how and why indigenous writing can be read as speculative, concluding that the three writers imagine futures as an act of ‘survivance’ (Vizenor) that asserts indigenous sovereignty and futurity. For these writers, survivance is predicated upon complex and ever-changing inter-species entanglements that grant postcolonial and non-human others a voice, and position such polyvocal perspectives as essential to reimagining environmental crisis.

Each of the chapters is book-ended by fictional interventions that loosen the borders between the creative and the theoretical, continuing the hybrid experimentation carried out by postcolonial sf writers. These original preludes and codas speak to the theoretical implications of the novels from which they take their inspiration and create resonances with those texts in their own form of critique and anticipation.

Chapter 1

Treasured Strangers: Reproduction, Biopolitics and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ Series

Prelude

She slithers out of her pod and sprawls on the floor, a spread-eagled specimen, this rebirth tattooed onto her DNA. She knows, from the dreams, that her world has ended, but she is not afraid.

Someone gathers her up and alien filaments penetrate her skin, burrow deep and flesh out her secrets. It does not hurt, but she cringes against the strange pleasure of the touch even as she sinks into it. Her body knows what her mind cannot accept and allows itself to be pulled apart and rearranged. She has no part in it at first; she is merely a conductor, a series of numbers being rearranged into the proper sequence, while the operator remains unseen, present only through its remaking of her.

Then that presence withdraws, and she is able to take command of herself. She investigates her body anew, from the inside out, from the nucleus of each cell, and from there, out, out, and away.

She is strangely free.

Opening her eyes, she exhales through new lungs into the infinite skies of the exosphere. Her body is fully hers in a way it never was before, and yet there is much more to it now, as though she can inhabit the spaces between mind and body, self and other, here and not here. She stumbles, and everything sharpens around her, as though reality has been corrected. She brings everything back to this body – these organs, these capillaries, these tendons – so she can begin to understand where she is and what has happened.

She is in a room, lying on a smooth white floor identical to the walls and the ceiling. She sits up, pressing one hand to her spinning head, the other to her stomach. As she concentrates on these discomforts, they disappear. She neutralises them without thinking. But there is no time to wonder at this – there is something more pressing. Her hand moves to her stomach, lower, and comes to rest between her hips. Her body recognises what her mind cannot yet comprehend. An embryo. A life. Xenogenesis.

A door appears and opens soundlessly in the cube of the room. She is on her feet without thinking. The alien enters and she is unafraid. She is already familiar with it through its touch, the imprint it has left on every cell of her body. It approaches her slowly and she welcomes it by taking one of its limbs.

It has begun. She finds herself wondering where it will end.

End? says the alien. Who says it will ever have to end?

Introduction

Widely recognised as the first female African-American sf writer, Octavia Butler left behind a remarkable legacy following her early death in 2006. Her groundbreaking oeuvre, spanning thirteen novels and numerous short stories, interrogates the intersecting issues of race, gender, species and technology, while crossing the genre boundaries of sf, fantasy, horror and historical fiction. Her work influenced a new generation of black sf writers, including Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor and Tananarive Due, and contributed female Afrofuturist visions to sf that contrasted sharply with the white, liberal and male-dominated narratives of the future that dominated future-thinking in the 1980s and 1990s.9

This chapter argues that Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ series – Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), collected in the Lilith’s Brood

9 These included, for example, cyberpunk, artificial intelligence and extropianism.

edition in 2000 – offers a utopian vision of human biology and evolution. By contrasting the genetic determinism and colonial enterprise of the alien Oankali with the human Resisters’ insistence on biological and reproductive independence, Butler enacts a politics of ambivalence that situates reproduction as an ongoing dialectical process within the context of broader ecological systems.

Although her work is certainly concerned with genetic engineering, Butler emphasises the importance of generation rather than reproduction. She articulates a theory of symbiogenesis in which human evolution is reliant on dynamic relationships with other species and environments. In the Xenogenesis trilogy (henceforth ‘Xenogenesis’), this is played out in the dystopian setting of the destruction of Earth, however, this is not the millennial end – it is only the beginning in an evolutionary teleology where the continually spontaneous generation of life replaces terminal apocalypse. Indeed, a close reading of Butler’s series reveals an assurance in the generative power of autopoietic life as it adapts to catastrophic events. Thus, the upheaval of the biosphere and the displacement of human ecologies in Butler’s dystopia create ideal conditions for the emergence of new life forms and systems. Butler offers myriad posthuman potentialities in which human evolution is not tied to genetic determinism but instead is contingent upon productive disruptions reconfiguring all relationships between organisms. This process of transformation and generation is deeply utopian, demonstrating the potential for the new, the different and the unimaginable that is always present in Butler’s work.

In her comparison of the Oankali ontology with the human, Butler uses the sf motif of alien contact to extrapolate on race and racism in what Isiah Lavender III terms a ‘meta-slavery’ narrative – a narrative that offers new representations of slavery and brings readers into contact with slavery in its past, present and future iterations (Race 60). For Lavender, slavery is

the “epitome of racism” and therefore provides the “inevitable starting point for any exploration of race in science fiction” (55).10

Butler is deeply concerned with the figure of the black woman as breeder, the history of reproduction as eugenics, and the scientific racism that has persisted in the United States (US) from colonial times to the present. This extends from the legacy of slavery – especially reproductive slavery and coercion – in the antebellum south to the continued exploitation of the reproductive labour of black and brown bodies from the developing world in expanding “tissue economies” (Waldby and Mitchell). ‘Xenogenesis’ therefore resonates with the contemporary bioeconomy – an economy built upon life science industries such as IVF, tissue engineering and gene therapy – that is distinctly racialised. In the series, Butler emphasises how race has been grafted upon human physiology as a form of political

10 Like colonisation, slavery is a prominent theme in sf and these stories have often been written by white male authors, including sf staples such as Robert A. Heinlein (‘Logic of Empire’ [1941], Farnham’s Freehold [1964], Citizen of the Galaxy [1957]); Thomas M. Disch (Mankind Under the Leash [1966]); Poul Anderson (‘Margin of Profit [1956], ‘The Master Key’ [1964]); and Gene Wolf (‘How the Whip Came Back’ [1970]). One particularly relevant example is the ‘Gor’ series, including Slave Girl of Gor (1977), by John Norman, in which independent women from Earth become submissive, even eager, slaves.

In her work on Afrofuturism, Lisa Yaszek gives Martin Delany’s Blake (1859-1862) as the first example of an African-American sf story, which tells the story of a free slave who aims to use agricultural technology to create a new cotton empire that will undermine the wealth and the slave trade of the South. Other examples of early Afrofuturist or AfroSF texts that reimagine slavery include Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903), and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1932) and Black Empire (1936-8). In the 1960s, Samuel R. Delany wrote Babel-17 (1966) and, later, Trouble on Triton (1976) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). While Butler’s neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) isn’t explicitly science fictional, it nevertheless utilises the fantastic mode to explore slavery.

Robots and Artifical Intelligence (AI) have also been used as a way to examine questions of ownership, autonomy and self-determination in ways that parallel master-slave relations. While Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1923) first introduced the idea of robots – a moniker derived from Slavic-origin words for slave – Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) brought robots to popular attention. In his novel, Asimov proposes the famous three laws of robotics to protect humans. Lavender suggests that although Asimov may not have recognised the racial implications of his work (with human masters and robot slaves mirroring white masters and black slaves), robots are a “logical step to our transformation to posthumanity” (61), and therefore demand consideration of how racial discourse plays into, or is elided by, this transformation (61). Such implications require further investigation, especially given the ongoing fascination with robots and AI in sf literature and film.

discourse, and that biopolitics is, therefore, always a “racialized assemblage” (Weheliye). Indeed, the three novels were written during a period when research and development in molecular biology, cell biology and microbiology were accelerating alongside the rise of neoliberalism in the US (Cooper 3), creating a new political economy of labour and (re)production (7) structured along race lines.

While white feminist sf, such as Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), has engaged with the increasing regulation of reproduction in concert with the growth of new economic systems that mobilise life as capital, Butler offers different perspectives rooted in her identity as an African-American woman. Rebekah Sheldon states that in The Handmaid’s Tale, ecological crisis is a “warrant for state-enforced reproductive futurism” that subjects women to a national response to a fertility crisis, while in Oryx and Crake, “full-throttle somatic capitalism . . . takes direct control over the germ-line through species-wide genocide and our replacement with humanoid transgenics” (n.p.).11 Butler offers a contrasting view of the influence of neoliberalism alongside the life sciences by illuminating the links between race, slavery, colonialism and biological capital through a meta-slavery narrative that speaks not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade but equally to the persistently hierarchised systems of capital that continue to expand in the 21st century. In a marked departure from white feminist sf, ‘Xenogenesis’ makes clear that the bioeconomies of colonial slavery and contemporary Assistive Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) transmute flesh into capital in ways made to seem at once natural and also technologically progressive. In doing so, Butler offers new insights into what these processes might mean for the development of the ‘human’ as a biological category.

11 Sheldon defines somatic capitalism as the “intervention into and monetisation of life itself” that dictates individual subjects’ “specific bodily capacities” (n.p.).

This chapter comprises four sections. The first section positions Butler within the context of African or Afrodiasporic sf, and identifies her work as both Afrofuturist and utopian, especially in the way it challenges gender and species norms. The second section explores ‘Xenogenesis’ against the history of reproductive coercion and scientific racism in the US. The third argues that the Oankali nation mirrors the contemporary bioeconomy, with its capital often constituting the biological material of black bodies. The final section discusses posthumanism, positing inter-species relationships as a way of dehierarchising and transforming the human.

As mentioned in the introduction, this chapter opens and closes with an original narrative. The prelude and coda pursue an interdisciplinary approach to the theoretical and aesthetic elements of ‘Xenogenesis,’ and frame discussion of Butler’s work as an ongoing speculative and fictive project.

Afrofuturism and utopianism in Butler

Butler’s work resides within the field of African and Afrodiasporic sf (henceforth AfroSF), which has garnered increasing attention in recent years. AfroSF envisions Africa-centred futures that contrast with Western depictions of Africa as colonial enterprise, adventure setting or disaster zone, utilising the tropes of science fiction, such as alien contact, space travel and post-apocalypse. AfroSF has also gained increasing academic attention, with special issues of Social Text, Science Fiction Studies, African Identities and Paradoxa.

AfroSF emerged in the early twentieth century in the work of European settlers in South Africa, including Joseph H. Doke, Archibald Lamont and Arthur M. Keppel-Jones (Bould 9).12 Indigenous African authors began

12 Doke wrote two lost race novels – The Secret City: A Romance of the Kaoroo (1913) and The Queen of the Secret City (1914). Lamont wrote South Africa in Mars (1923), which features ghosts working on an interplanetary scheme to save South Africa. Keppel-Jones’s When Smuts Goes: A History of South Africa (1947) imagines the advent of a fascist Afrikaner government. (Bould 9)

producing sf from the 1960s with novels such as Mohammed Dib’s Who Remembers the Sea (1962), Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) and Mwangala Bonna’s The Feller of Trees (2009) (Bould 10-11), while AfroSF in America began with the work of Pauline Hopkins13 and George Schuyler,14 and came to prominence from the 1960s with the work of Samuel R. Delany.15

Today, AfroSF has achieved international attention. The Kenyan sf film Pumzi won the Best Short Film award at the Cannes Independent Film Festival in 2010, and South African writers and filmmakers in particular have begun to enjoy commercial and critical success (see Chapter 2). There have also been a number of anthologies featuring AfroSF, including Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Thomas 2000), its follow-up Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (Thomas 2004), and AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers (Hartmann 2012). Public conversations about diversity in Western sf are also increasing, with recent discussions around the casting of John Boyega as a Stormtrooper in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015) and Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016).

AfroSF is one manifestation of the broader movement of Afrofuturism, which emerged in the 1970s with writers such as Delany and Butler, and musicians such as Sun Ra, Public Enemy, Parliament and Funkadelic.

13 Hopkins wrote a variation of a lost race story called ‘One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self’ which was serialised in The Coloured Magazine (1902-1903). Briggs, a black medical student, falls in love with a woman who, it is revealed, is the reincarnation of an Ethiopian princess from the Lost World of Meroe. Briggs travels to Africa, becomes the King of Meroe and learns of the biological homogeneity of humans, regardless of race.

14 Schuyler is best-known for Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940 (1932). An African-American scientist invents a procedure that transforms black skin into white. As America becomes increasingly white, the economic benefits of segregation are exposed.

15 Delany is perhaps the best-known African-American sf writer. His novels include Babel- 17 (1966), Nova (1968), Dhalgren (1975), Trouble on Triton (1976) and the ‘Return to Nevèrÿon’ series (1979-1987).

Afrofuturism takes as its point of departure the assumption of “Blackness . . . as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress” (Nelson 1). It incorporates African mythology, oral storytelling techniques and spiritual beliefs into techno-futures (Thaler) in response to persistent hostilities to “Afrodiasporic projection” (Eshun 301). For Kodwo Eshun, Afrofuturism intervenes in the “dimension of the predictive, the projected, the propletic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional” (293). Afrofuturism is, therefore, heavily invested in deconstructing the binaries that position African cultural production as ‘authentic’ in its exoticism or otherness, and rarely progressive or futuristic. According to Mark Dery, Afrofuturism is:

speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture – and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future. (735)

Afrofuturism expands beyond African-American signification to encompass African and Afrodiasporic projections of futurity more broadly, whether through fiction, art, music, theatre or other forms. Recently, Lisa Yaszek has given more definitive parameters for Afrofuturism, which, she argues, emerged between 1880 and 1940 – a period that saw the rise in popularity of American sf (60). She gives three characteristics for Afrofuturist stories in the American sf tradition. Afrofuturist stories “reclaim American history” by revealing how African slaves and African- Americans endure the “homelessness, alienation, and dislocation” coterminous with modernity (58); they use the experience of Afrodiasporic people to survive and challenge these conditions and expand ideas of the variety of experience in “raced futures” (59); and they link these futures to the “figure of the black genius,” usually a young, male scientist or inventor

who engineers his way out of white oppression, changing the course of history (59).16

Yaszek positions Afrofuturism as a “counterpart” (60) to AfroSF, with both offering ideas of the future that sharply contradict those offered by white, mainstream sf. Although her identification of the black genius is an essential part of this, especially during the historical period she identifies as the breeding ground for such stories, Afrofuturism is perhaps best characterised by its broad orientation towards the future, while AfroSF specifically mobilises science fictional storytelling techniques. Afrofuturism takes account of the diverse experiences of race, slavery and oppression from the colonial to the present, and offers an oppositional consciousness to reimagine the future as it has been hijacked by white, masculine and imperialist discourse. While Butler’s work is certainly preoccupied with Yazek’s first two criteria for Afrofuturism, in Lilith, Butler creates an antithesis to the figure of the young black hero. While Yaszek’s Afrofuturist protagonist is endowed with a genius that allows him to outwit the conditions of his oppression, Butler’s female protagonist, Lilith, works within the parameters of her oppression as a path of resistance. Butler’s work is therefore both Afrofuturist and AfroSF, because it is not only a form of oppositional consciousness oriented towards the future, reconfiguring ideas of race, gender and technology, but it also draws on the specific sf techniques that underpin AfroSF as a

16 Yaszek argues that the first example of Afrofuturism that fulfills these criteria is Martin Delany’s Blake, which tells the story of Henry Holland, a West Indian kidnapped and sold into slavery. When his wife his sold to another owner, Holland, now named Blake by his masters, embarks on a mission to rescue her, spreading liberty and revolution among other slaves on the way, and establishing a Grand Council of freed slaves. “By combining the agricultural expertise of Africans with the technocultural ability of Afrodiasporic people . . . Blake and his Council plan to build a transcontinental cotton empire that will undermine the U.S. South’s economic might and dismantly slavery” (59). Other early examples of Afrofuturism that meet her criteria include Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903), Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904) and Roger Sherman Tracy’s The White Man’s Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), while contemporary examples include Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ (1984) and Andrea Hairston’s Mindscape (2006).

generic and, originally, literary mode, including alien contact and post- apocalyptic survival.

AfroSF and Afrofuturism share a mutual interest in imagining black futures that explore African and Afrodiasporic historical experiences, issues of identity, and the relationships between technology, power and culture. While Afrofuturism may not always specifically invoke the technological, often experimenting with, as Alonda Nelson argues, the specific histories, traditions and modes of representation of the authors’ cultural heritage, both Afrofuturism and AfroSF explore how the assertion of alterity can transform the future.

Butler is deeply invested in such futures, particularly those that extrapolate the experiences of African and Afrodiasporic women. The new social structures she imagines are often predicated on symbiosis or mutualism with other species as in ‘Xenogenesis,’ the Patternist series (1976-1984), the short story ‘Bloodchild’ (1984) and the vampire novel Fledgling (2005). The loss of human autonomy through inter-species dependencies in her fiction illuminates the social and discursive constructions of species, including the human – a category that has previously excluded Africans, Asians and indigenous peoples. She is particularly concerned with the complex relationships between race, gender and sovereignty, positing new worlds that use biological exchange to represent the broader compromises and connections between central and peripheral subjects typical of both Afrofuturism and AfroSF. While many feminist sf writers are interested in women’s bodies and reproduction as a site of patriarchal dominance, Butler offers unique insight into the potential and implications of genetic experimentation and crossbreeding within a colonial context. By alluding to the construction of the black woman throughout history – for example, as highly sexualised animal, as commercial breeder and as negligent mother – Butler radically reimagines the construction of black women’s bodies. In doing so, she

eschews any easy notion of an Afrofuturist or black feminist utopia, and shows how the symbiotic futures she presents are always complicated by issues of power, free will and identity.

Susanna M. Morris describes Butler as an Afrofuture feminist. She states that Butler’s work reflects the “shared central tenets of Afrofuturism and black feminist thought” while also offering a counterpoint to the white feminist sf of writers such as Atwood, especially in her treatment of reproduction (154). According to Hoda M. Zaki, Butler’s writing explores tensions between African-American women and the (white) feminist movement in “an indirect critique of the liberal feminist imagination and politics expressed in contemporary feminist SF” (239). Zaki further argues that Butler undermines liberal feminism’s claim to transcultural, transhistorical authority, representing a “more democratic and egalitarian movement” to “radically estrange her readers from their environs” and “thereby strengthen and enrich the feminist utopian tradition in SF” (247). This goes beyond merely depicting women of colour within the narrative to express the alternate realities experienced by those women and other ex- centric characters.

Zaki also recognises that Butler’s work blends utopian, dystopian and anti- utopian sentiment (247). Butler herself rejects the value of utopia and sees humans as inherently flawed, stating: “I’ve never actually projected an ideal society. I don’t believe that imperfect humans can form a perfect society” (Beal 14). While Butler eschews the static, closed utopia exemplified by More, her work is imbued with a utopianism predicated on the exploration and exchange of difference. In ‘Xenogenesis’, transformation of the human as a biological subject is necessary to survive, either with the alien Oankali as one of Lilith’s brood, or in response to the environmental conditions on Mars as a Resister. This involves exploring and diffusing the “ostensibly clear-cut distinctions between self and other” that Jenny Wolmark regards as one of the markers of feminist sf (2),

creating possibilities for non-hierarchical and co-constitutive species interactions and identities. With the anti-messianic actions of the Oankali, who rescue Lilith and a selection of other humans after Earth is destroyed, ‘Xenogenesis’ reverses the West’s millennial myths of post-apocalyptic salvation. Instead, Butler presents the intersection between Oankali and human as an opportunity for a transformative and collaborative autopoiesis that displaces the “hierarchical dualisms of naturalised identities” – of human, of woman, of alien and other – that Haraway believes are central to the myths of Western culture (Simians 175). When the self becomes indistinguishable from the other in inter-species entanglements that destabilise an essentialised human identity in ‘Xenogenesis,’ a utopian imperative towards ongoing transforming and becoming emerges.

Thus, while Butler herself does not place much faith in utopia, perhaps perceiving dystopia as the more realistic mode of representation, her work is nevertheless utopian in its exploration of alterity. Butler’s bold forays into realms beyond the present critique the manifold situations under which black women have been othered. Fredric Jameson states that utopian texts have the capacity to generate new visions that “include those of the past and modify or correct them” (Archaeologies xv). ‘Xenogenesis’ is one such example of a utopian text that charts the impossibility of achieving utopia yet remains a mode in which the “Utopian wish is authentically registered and set down” (Archaeologies 84) – in short, it seeks “Utopianism after the end of Utopia” (Postmodernism).

At the centre of Butler’s utopianism is the construction of sex and race as biopolitical issues. Butler’s Oankali see these as commodities that stimulate their own reproduction and colonial expansion. Their genetic predisposition for the acquisition and appropriation of new genetic material provides an intriguing allegory for the operations of the neoliberal bioeconomy, while figuring the human as both trading partner and

resource articulates the complex history and politics of reproduction in relation to the African-American body. At the same time, Butler grasps that ‘humanity’ is a “historically contingent, transitional phenomenon rather than the apex of biological possibility” (White 399). When the hierarchical binaries that propagate an essential human subject are challenged by alien intervention, Butler critiques assumptions about biological identity in order to articulate the utopian possibilities of transformation.

Black body politics in ‘Xenogenesis’

Xenogenesis means ‘the production of offspring different from either of its parents’; this is reproduction with a difference, the (re)production of difference. And the ‘xeno’ of this genesis comes from the Greek xenos, which in its original bivalence meant both guest/friend and alien/stranger. (Peppers 47)

‘Xenogenesis’ takes place after a nuclear war decimates Earth and most of its human population. Lilith Iyapo, an African-American woman whose son is killed in the devastation, is rescued by an alien race known as the Oankali. She awakens on board their spaceship after being held in suspended animation for 250 years and is introduced to Jdahya, a male Oankali. She learns that among the Oankali there are three sexes – male, female and ooloi. Ooloi is the third sex that mediates sexual relations between male and female. The ooloi have sensory arms capable of penetrating flesh and manipulating genetic data, which they can store within an organ in their chests.

The Oankali are a nomadic species who seek out life forms on new planets and adapt the genetic material they discover to advance their own evolution. This could be perceived as a form of biocolonialism or, in the eyes of the Oankali, a more benign symbiosis. They crossbreed with new species to create the next iteration of Oankali with greater physical and

mental capabilities before leaving to find another world with yet more new genetic material to harvest. ‘Oankali’ has many meanings, including “gene trader” (41). It is also the name of an organelle within each cell of the Oankali body that makes them “powerfully acquisitive” (41). Jdahya explains to Lilith that the Oankali “acquire new life – seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it” (41). This is the “essence” and “origin” of themselves (41), a biological imperative that drives them from galaxy to galaxy on board living ships, which are seeded in the earth of the planets they reap and grow over time until they’re ready to take flight. Without this constant appropriation of new life, Jdahya says the Oankali could not survive, and when Lilith asks if they ever wish to return to their original home, he replies: “Go back? . . . No, Lilith, that’s the one direction that’s closed to us . . . I doubt that it does still exist . . . It was a womb. The time had come for us to be born” (36).

The conditions of this rebirthing are, however, difficult for Lilith to swallow. The Oankali task her with awakening other humans saved from the holocaust on Earth, informing them of the situation on board the alien spaceship, and leading them through survival training so they will be able to return to a rehabilitated Earth. While on Earth, the Oankali will interbreed with humans to create ‘construct’ children – children genetically engineered by the ooloi and combining both Oankali and human genes. The Oankali posit this as a trade because, as they explain to Lilith, the human race is doomed due to two incompatible genetic characteristics – intelligence and hierarchism – which they call the Human Contradiction (467). Without this deadly combination, humans may have been able to avoid their self-destruction, but now their only hope of survival lies within the trade. The specific terms of the trade: for humans, the dramatic increase of life span and health through genetic modification; for the Oankali, their ability to diversify will be boosted through appropriating the human genetic “talent” for cancer (22), which will enable them to regrow limbs and develop more malleable bodies. The construct

children will also fulfil the Oankali’s genetic drive to evolve while remaining free of the Human Contradiction.

In an Afrofuture-feminist manoeuvre, Butler brings the experience of the black woman as biopolitical subject to the fore. She illuminates the history of the control of black women’s reproduction while also promoting the transformative possibilities of alien encounters. In reimagining the ways in which the black female body has been appropriated and represented, she draws attention to how it is still not fully articulated.

Lilith is horrified at the prospect of the Oankali’s trade and the inter- species children, who will not be ‘human,’ and equates herself with breeding stock:

In a very real sense, she was an experimental animal . . . She was intended to live and reproduce . . . Human biologists had done that before the war – used a few captive members of an endangered animal species to breed more for the wild population. Was that what she was headed for? Forced artificial insemination. Surrogate motherhood? Fertility drugs and forced ‘donations’ of eggs? Implementation of unrelated fertilized eggs. Removal of children from mothers at birth . . . Humans had done these things to captive breeders – all for a higher good, of course. (60)

When she learns the Oankali have been breeding more humans so they will have additional genetic material to work with, she wonders if her own eggs or DNA were taken from her body while she was in suspended animation and used to create children without her knowledge or consent. She wakes with a scar on her abdomen that is never explained but suggests the extraction of eggs or other biological material. In a conversation with Paul Titus, a man the Oankali woke before her and used to create over 70 children, she says she will refuse to give them a human child “to tamper

with,” to which Paul replies, “You probably already have” (94). Later, when Lilith begins waking the other human survivors, she explains the gene trade to them and, although some of them refuse to believe her, Joseph immediately grasps the eugenic implications of what he sees as “genetic tampering”:

There was a lot of work being done in genetics before the war. That may have devolved into some kind of eugenics program afterward. Hitler might have done something like that after World War Two if he had had the technology and if he had survived . . . I think our best bet now is to learn all we can. Get facts. Keep our eyes open. Then later we can make the best possible use of any opportunities we might have to escape. (143)

This develops into the “learn and run” (143) strategy, with Lilith and the other human survivors determined to get through training and, once on Earth, escape the Oankali. Lilith’s situation directly recalls the colonial relationship between the black female and white male body, from slave breeding and eugenic discourse though to contemporary organ markets that exploit the biological labour of poor black and brown bodies.

Lilith’s perspective is not an expression of senseless paranoia but a justified fear arising from centuries of scientific racism17 based on putative

17 Scientific racism has been used by medical professionals to justify slavery, as in Samuel A. Cartwright’s ‘The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,’ published in the 1840s, which posits a range of innate mental defects among Africans and suggests they have different pulmonary and skeletal systems to whites. Cartwright states that Africans are susceptible to a host of specific diseases, manifesting in symptoms such as laziness and the abuse of white slave owners’ property, which Cartwright proposes to cure with corporal punishment (Washington 36-7). Pro-slavery physicians such as Josiah Clark Nott, Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz and George Robins Gliddon also portrayed blacks as “inherently debased and immutably so: No amount of training, education, or good treatment could make him the equal of a white man” (Washington 35).

This kind of racism was propounded even earlier by Thomas Jefferson in Query XIV in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. In a text otherwise noted for its discourses on defining topics such as liberty, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state, Jefferson suggests that differences in “colour, figure, and

genetic differences between white and black bodies that were often used to justify slavery. The effects of such scientific racism are clear: black bodies were seen as defective or inferior and were therefore freely available for commercial gain, whether as slaves, breeders or “clinical material” (Washington 103), as in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.18 Harriet A. Washington sees many African-Americans’ distrust of medical professionals, or ‘iatrophobia,’ from the Greek iatros (healer) and phobia (fear), as the logical outcome of scientific racism (21).

White scientific control over the black body because of its biological inferiority even transcended death. Black bodies were subject to a “postmortem racism” (Washington 118) in which they were stolen from graves for medical students or experiments. Washington states that such practices were an extension of slavery into death, representing “a profound level of white control over their bodies, illustrating that they were not free even in death” (125). This resonates with Lilith’s fears about the theft of her genetic material while in suspended animation, together with her concern that after her death the Oankali will create a clone of her from their genetic records or ‘prints’. Again, this is not mere paranoia; Butler merely extrapolates upon the racist biopolitics in the US, where black women have been the victims of forced sterilisation that suggests a eugenic

hair” between blacks and whites are “fixed in nature” and provide the “foundation of a greater or lesser share of beauty in the two races” (n.p.). Jefferson points to the physiognomy of blacks, such as skin secretions and different pulmonary systems that make them more “tolerant of heat,” in addition to limited emotional, rational and imaginative capacities, as evidence that “blacks . . .are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (n.p.).

18 These experiments were conducted by the United States Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 in Alabama on African-American men with syphilis. Most of the men were poor share-croppers who had previously been treated for syphilis. In exchange for their participation in the study, the men received free medical care, meals and burial insurance so doctors could study the natural progression of the disease. None of the men infected were informed they had syphilis; they were told they suffered from ‘bad blood.’ None were administered penicillin, even though this became the standard cure in 1947. The experiment had devastating outcomes: 28 died of syphilis and 100 more of syphilis- related complications. Forty of the participants’ wives were infected with syphilis and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis (Jones).

focus, as with the Mississippi Appendectomies,19 together with targeted birth control campaigns that fed suspicions of a genocidal agenda in the 1960s.

Although the Oankali deny that their enterprise involves trading slaves, many readers interpret the story as a mirror of the relationship between slaves and masters in America (Tucker 172). For example, Michelle Green argues that humans in ‘Xenogenesis’ constitute a “colonized other” and are “like animals” reduced to “package(s) of genes” (188), while Amanda Boulter compares the 250 years Lilith spends in suspended animation to the “temporal distortion” experienced by slaves on the Middle Passage (qtd. in Tucker 172). To Boulter, the Oankali’s bioevolutionary program is a form of miscegenation “comparable to the rape of black slave women by white owners and overseers, which would increase their owners’ stock,” and Lilith’s forced pregnancy constitutes an “invasion of her body” that creates “ambivalent feelings” similar to those experienced by slave women who bore children to white masters without consenting (qtd. in Tucker 172-3). Jeffrey A. Tucker suggests that Butler’s own race has ultimately led to overdetermined interpretations of her work as paralleling slavery, and cites Naomi Jacobs’s argument that Butler is “more interested in issues of ‘symbiosis’ than slavery” (qtd. in Tucker 174). Although Butler is certainly interested in symbiosis, it seems more likely that the symbiotic relationship between Lilith and the Oankali is not only a form of oppression but also the only means of resistance available to humans within the racialised structures of a reimagined colonial system, historically epitomised by slavery. Symbiosis offers a way to survive. Through her ambivalent relationship with the Oankali, Lilith maintains a

19 The Mississippi Appendectomies were involuntary sterilisations conducted on unconsenting African-American women during the 1920s and 1930s. The women believed they were receiving treatment for other conditions, such as appendicitis. Washington states this was to stop “poor black women . . . from reproducing and to give young doctors a chance to practice the procedure” (50). The term is also frequently applied to the sterilisation of other unconsenting women of colour, or women who are poor or disabled, especially those with an intellectual disability.

form of oppositional consciousness that recalls the severely limited options of slaves and other colonial subjects, to the extent that survival becomes a primary form of resistance.

Butler’s biopolitics, in which women are equated with slaves or breeding animals, is exemplary of the politicisation of race in the United States, creating distinctly white, masculine configurations of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye proposes the term habeas viscus to evoke how the state “pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not” (11). Habeas viscus positions flesh and the body as more than ‘bare life’ – it exposes how the biological is always a ‘racializing assemblage’. In challenging the presumptions underlying the discursive and biological construction of the ‘human,’ the ‘Xenogenesis’ series acts as an oppositional assemblage, combining political, critical and aesthetic modes to highlight how black bodies have consistently been colonised to create particular assemblages of humanity based on the imposition of ‘scientific’ criteria. This is part of Butler’s Afrofuturist agenda, which situates race at the centre of the construction of scientific and technological progress. Given the limited subject position and agency of ex-centric subjects within these racialised assemblages, Butler questions how “deformations of freedom” (Weheliye 22) in the face of subjection as deep, as broad, as complex and as unassailable as slavery, genocide, segregation and other kinds of race violence can be negotiated. Butler’s writing provides an example of how to think and live “enfleshment” to encourage “different genres of the human” (Weheliye 22-3). To do so requires an oppositional consciousness to navigate assemblages of the human so deeply entwined with race, science and technology that the categories are often inseparable.

The ‘learn and run’ strategy offers an excellent example of this oppositional consciousness. Survival is a form of resistance that encourages adaptation rather than assimilation (Melzer 54). While Lilith is trapped by the limited options available to her, she always takes a counter-

hegemonic position, or what Chela Sandoval terms “differentiated consciousness” (qtd. in Melzer 55), which offers “creative alternatives” to the options and identities imposed by the colonial Oankali (55). This counter-position differs drastically from the oppositional strategies of “heroic resistance” that white, male sf characters so often deploy – “armored fight, honoured death valued over dishonored capture, self- sacrifice, or resistance until death” (57) – because Lilith understands the reality of undermining hegemonic systems from the position of outsider as someone who, within biopolitical discourse, has not always been deemed ‘human.’ Survival, adaptation and maintaining an identity beyond that which is imposed by the coloniser are therefore essential to Lilith’s resistance, and familiar techniques within a history of the oppressed. Melzer highlights how significant it is that Butler’s protagonist is Lilith, who works with the Oankali to create a new future for humans, rather than one of the human Resisters, who “fight the Oankali ‘the good old way’” and “either die in the long run or lead isolated, sterile lives” (56). The ‘learn and run’ strategy is hardly the plotline for a character whose subjectivity and status has always been confirmed by their race and biology. However, for Butler’s humans, and for Lilith in particular, ‘learn and run’ is a form of colonial negotiation that reveals how assemblages of race, gender and empire demand creative ways to assert personhood and mount resistance. Symbiosis is an Afrofuturist survival technique. Thus, although Lilith accepts the genetic modifications that grant her superhuman strength and healing, and becomes part of an Oankali family, raising construct children, there is a strong sense of dissent that continues to set her apart from others. There is no happy ending, in which Lilith submits to the will of the aliens as her white, colonial masters. Yet, as Melzer points out, neither does she choose the path of the Resisters, who, for the majority of the series, have no future due to their refusal to participate in the trade. The limited choices Lilith is forced to grapple with create a tension that pervades the entire series, even after the narrative focus moves away from

her in the second and third novels, evident in this except from Adulthood Rites:

Lilith had these flares of bitterness sometimes. They never seemed to affect her behavior, though often they frightened people. . . . ‘It’s as though there’s something in her trying to get out. Something terrible.’ Whenever the something seemed on the verge of surfacing, Lilith went alone into the forest and stayed away for days. [T]hey used to worry that she would leave and not come back.’ (274)

For Lilith, an African-American woman singled out of the human population for her genetic and reproductive utility, her position awakens deep-seated fears rooted in a longstanding history of scientific racism that continues to manifest through iatrophobia and and other racialising assemblages. While Lilith’s position becomes more open toward the Oankali throughout the series, especially once her construct children become dependent on human companionship and effectively tie the two species together, she always clings to the vestiges of her original genetic citizenship as human. She is forced to wrestle with the Oankali’s transformative yet therapeutic practices and the sense of obligation or peonage they engender among their human trade partners. Lilith’s relationship to the Oankali is always complicated by issues of sovereignty, power and consent – issues that shape the biopolitical and bioeconomic contexts of ‘Xenogenesis’. The increasing power of multinational corporations to financialise women’s bodies through genetic engineering and other life sciences offers a new direction for Afrofuturist writers such as Butler to consider how racialising assemblages are both reinforced and reproduced in bioeconomies, beginning with slavery and continuing to the neoliberal markets of the 21st century.

The Oankali bioeconomy as colonial negotiation

The contemporary bioeconomy in many ways perpetuates the scientific racism and unequal power relations experienced under colonialism and slavery by African and African-American women. This inequality is evident in international tissue economies, particularly kidney and ova markets, in which citizens from the global south exchange their biological material for the cash of predominantly white, Western citizens in an exploitative, under-regulated economy.20 Reproductive labour is an important part of this economy. Janice G. Raymond argues that reproductive liberalism in the US in the 1980s created a new class of women who could be traded as “reproductive commodities” (62). She calls these women “throw-away women who are discarded after fulfilling their breeding role,” whether as surrogates, prostitutes, or women who sell their unborn children into prostitution or slavery – in short, a form of indentured “incubatory servitude” (62). H. Animashaun Ducre argues that the term ‘throw-away woman’ also applies to the devaluation of African-American mothers in the surrogacy market.21

Reprogenetic technologies that capitalise on reproductive liberalism in the US reinforce race and class stratification, creating what Dorothy E. Roberts sees as a new reproductive dystopia. This dystopia not only

20 In Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts, Michelle Goodwin describes the contemporary underground organ markets that exploit the bodies of, among others, Chinese inmates and poor populations in Africa, India and Brazil. In just one example, she recounts the Doheny Eye Bank Case of 1997 when corneas were stolen from primarily African-American and other non-white bodies. She also demonstrates that African-Americans are still discriminated against when waiting for organ donations and, at the same time, are reluctant to donate, which could be attributed to the iatrophobia Washington discusses in Medical Apartheid.

21 She gives the example of Anna Johnson, a single black mother who was paid $10,000 to provide gestational surrogacy services to the Calvert couple. By the time of the birth, the relationship between Anna and the Calverts had deteriorated to the point that Anna filed for custody. Ducre states that the Calverts were granted custody of the child in part because of the racist discourse around Anna, with “prevailing notions of the subordinated status of surrogacy in its reduction to alienated labour in general, but more specifically the disregard for Black women’s claims to motherhood in particular” (59). Deborah Grayson states that the traditional roles of black women as wet nurses and nannies led to the assumption in the Calvert case that “Black women have long been asked to raise white children without having any parental rights to them. Now, it would seem, they can be asked to birth white children and have no claim to them” (Grayson in Ducre 59).

exploits the reproductive labour of poor women but also restricts new ARTs to those who can pay. While the old reproductive dystopia was based on racial hierarchies and thus had a eugenic focus, the new dystopia is characterised by a neoliberalism that assigns all women’s reproductive labour a market value. In ‘Xenogenesis,’ Butler explicates the links between these two systems through the figure of Lilith, a black woman labouring under both old and new forms of reproductive dystopia, emphasising how the contemporary neoliberal bioeconomy is not entirely new or post-racial.

Butler is concerned not only with the after-effects of slavery on the reproductive freedom of African-Americans today, but also the economic conditions under which life itself is mobilised as capital. There is an intriguing correlation between the biocolonialism of the Oankali, who seek out and appropriate new life forms in order to extend themselves infinitely across worlds, and the development of the bioeconomy under late capitalism. While Cathy Peppers sees the Oankali as biophilic – rooted in their biological drive toward diversification of life – and not eugenic, their nomadic lifestyle is nevertheless also a colonial enterprise, with the Oankali reaping each planet of its biodiversity to fuel new iterations of themselves.

‘Xenogenesis’ was written in the context of rapid changes to the life science industries and the neoliberal economy during the 1980s in the United States. Melinda Cooper describes the emergence of the biotechnology industry in tandem with the rise of neoliberalism under the Reagan administration, deeming it the “dominant political philosophy of our time” (19). She cites a range of new regulatory measures that situated economic production at the “genetic, microbial, and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed with capitalist processes of accumulation” (19). Late capitalism mobilised biology; no longer was the economy built on standardised production – it became preoccupied with innovation.

Speculative investment underpinned the flourishing bioeconomy, enabling the production and ongoing growth of new life forms. Life itself became a force of economic production, with profits depending on the accumulation of biological futures through, for example, ARTs and gene therapy, rather than on tangible artefacts. As Cooper states:

What stem cell science seeks to produce is not the potential organism – nor even this or that particular type of differentiated cell – but rather biological promise itself, in a state of nascent transformability. More precisely, it seeks to discover the culture conditions under which the biological promise becomes self-regenerative, self-accumulative, and self-renewing. It wants to culture the [embryonic stem] cell in such a way that it is able to perpetually regenerate its own potentiality, in the form of a not-yet realised surplus of life. (140)

‘Xenogenesis’ responds to the changing neoliberal biotech industry in the 1980s and the ways in which the desire to create a “surplus of life” perpetuated colonial relations between black and white bodies. Both the Oankali and biotech companies strive to overcome ‘natural’ limits to growth in favour of a “speculative reinvention of the future” (Cooper 11). In Butler’s work, the “speculative logic of financial capital” (12) is expressed in the promissory nature of the Oankali’s colonial enterprise, evident in the terms of the trade, which are rooted in their rapacious biological instincts. Like a biotech company, the Oankali assert a proprietary claim over all life forms and over all future profits they may lead to, as in their appropriation of Lilith’s genetic ‘talent’ for cancer.

The ooloi experiment with Lilith’s cancer cells to explore the possibility of regrowing limbs, increasing their lifespan, and shapeshifting to look more like their trade partners so they will seem more appealing to them. Although an ooloi enables Lilith’s body to reabsorb her cancer through a “chemical command” (22) – effectively curing her – Jdahya explains that it

also “learned about you from your genes” and “it knows your medical history and a great deal about the way you think. It has taken part in testing you” (22). This passage echoes the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks for the massive financial benefit of researchers and pharmaceutical companies.22 Lilith cannot forgive the ooloi for examining her without her permission, but is helpless to prevent any such invasions when the Oankali believe that, as her trade partner, they have a right to any genetic material they desire.

They are several dynamics at play within Butler’s fiction that reflect the changing bioeconomic environment of the 1980s, including the relation of the individual (the human) to the nation (the Oankali civilisation); the ethics of profiting from the (unconsenting) appropriation of another’s biological material; and the assertion of a sovereign right over one’s own body. While the Oankali ‘nation’ may enact neoliberal modes of production, it also borrows from the principles of the welfare state in its creation of a sense of mutual obligation – the trade. Like the Oankali, the welfare state is interested in the reproductive life of the individual and its contribution to the nation, thus establishing a “mutualization of the biological in the service of the collective life of the nation” (Cooper 8).23

22 Gerry Canavan, who has conducted research into the Octavia E. Butler archives in The Huntington Library, states that when Butler wrote ‘Xenogenesis’ she was aware of the story of Henrietta Lacks. Lacks was a poor black woman whose cervical tissue was taken without her consent during a procedure at Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat cervical cancer. The tissue was cultured by George Gey and became the first immortal cell line (the HeLa cell line) – the oldest and still most commonly used human cell line – which has been integral to medical research, including the development of the polio vaccine. They were also the first cells to be successfully cloned, and some evolutionary theorists even sought to identify the line as a new species. As Rebecca Skloot argues, the cells were central to a flourishing bioeconomy – the mass distribution of the HeLa cell line saw the development of a global and highly profitable industry (Skloot 100-1) – yet Lacks’s family were not informed of the removal of Henrietta’s tissue and have not benefited from the profits, living without medical insurance and suffering the emotional and psychological effects of their mother’s after-life.

23 Citing Francois Ewald, Cooper describes how the welfare state “institutionalized a form of collective, social generation: ‘The relationship of the individual to society is one of generation, kinship, inheritance,’ such that the protection of life becomes a political problem on par with the reproduction of the nation, its continuity into the future” (8).

Both the welfare state and the Oankali nation create obligation – or, for Lilith, a debt peonage – in which what is owed is the biological material, including the reproductive labour, of black women’s bodies. In this economy, the Oankali give life and moderate the conditions under which it is received, as in their sterilisation of all Resisters who will not live in the Oankali’s communities and breed with them.

Butler demonstrates how the new paradigm of the neoliberal bioeconomy is closely entwined with issues of race, nation and power through an Afrofuturist narrative. The question of ownership is particularly pertinent. For biotech companies in today’s neoliberal economy, patents allow for the ownership of an organism’s “principle of generation without having to own the actual organism” (Cooper 24), while for the Oankali, owning the source codes to life through their ability to manipulate biology and create construct children enables them to coerce Lilith into the trade. Such control represents a new form of ownership, justified by their biologically programmed curiosity and reinforced through the colonial subjectivity imposed upon subjects like Lilith.

However, curiosity alone is not enough to ensure the continued development of the Oankali race. Chance and catastrophe also play major roles in their ongoing genesis. The Oankali engage in a strategy of seeding worlds with their own mitochondria, anticipating that they or their relatives will return one day to find new life forms to harvest – itself a speculative investment. They also capitalise on the catastrophic war on Earth in order to obtain and profit from new biological material that resonates with some theories of biospheric evolution. Rather than writing the conventional post-apocalyptic or alien invasion narrative that marks the end of the human, or seeing the next iteration of the species as one entirely dependent on genetic engineering, Butler extrapolates into futures

Because the benefits of new life are distributed to all, all are equally obliged to provide life to the nation.

in which humans develop both symbiotically and spontaneously with others.

Xenogenesis: from catastrophe to creation

While Lilith grapples with the trade throughout the series, the Oankali’s terms are completely unacceptable for some humans. Butler offers humans a choice: a future, like Lilith’s, with the Oankali as genetic material in an ongoing symbiotic co-evolution, or an uncertain yet more independent future as a human colony on a terraformed Mars. The Resisters choose the latter. As humans rendered sterile by the Oankali, they decide not to live within their prescribed communities once they return to Earth. At first, they live within their own infertile communities, which are as free of alien interference as possible, but at the end of the final novel in ‘Xenogenesis’ they convince the Oankali to terraform Mars so they can establish a new human world there with the help of the construct child, Akin.

As a child with both human and Oankali genes, Akin is uniquely situated to understand the Resisters’ need to live and reproduce autonomously, and to communicate this desire to the Oankali. Unlike the other Oankali, he acquires an understanding and sympathy for humans after living in a Resister community, and becomes their advocate:

Who among the Oankali was speaking for the interests of resister Humans? Who had seriously considered that it might not be enough to let Humans choose either union with the Oankali or sterile lives free of the Oankali? Trade-village Humans said it, but they were so flawed, so genetically contradictory that they were often not listened to. He did not have their flaw. He had been assembled within the body of an ooloi. He was Oankali enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know that resister Humans were being treated with cruelty and condescension. (369)

Akin’s position supports the hypothesis in Butler’s work that “genetics may offer us clues to our identity and potential” but “is not a script that determines our fate” (Vint 68). While the Oankali are convinced humans are doomed by their genetic contradiction, Akin and the Resisters are hopeful that humans’ hierarchical tendencies will be mitigated by behavioural adaptations or genetic mutations in response to their new environments, creating a more stable society. Akin facilitates the establishment of the Mars colony by deferring to bioevolutionary chance – the very instances of catastrophe and adaptation that provide the Oankali with the biological diversity that sustains them. “Chance exists. Mutation. Unexpected effects of the new environment. Things no one has thought of. Oankali can make mistakes” (488). Thus, while Butler is critical of the ways in which the Oankali use genetic determinism to continue exploiting Lilith and their trade partners, she also gives credence to the Oankali’s convictions. It is this very ambivalence that reinforces the need to break free of the discursive constructs of biology which continue to inform racist biopolitical and bioeconomic relations. For Butler, a future with the Oankali or a future on Mars will both necessitate radical transformation, and it is this ambivalence that gives ‘Xenogenesis’ its utopian impetus.

As acquisitive species, humans and Oankali develop relationships with other life forms to encourage the growth of new life as a speculative investment. This hinges on encountering the new – the fortunate anomaly, the defective gene, or the environmental accident that spawns ongoing transformation. Indeed, for Butler, as for some evolutionary theorists, the development of new life is conditional on periodic environmental catastrophe.

Bioevolutionary theorists such as Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and Dorion Sagan believe that what characterises biospheric evolution is “the continued disturbance of geological, chemical, and atmospheric equilibria” (Cooper 35). In its persistent expansion, life’s “law of evolution is one of

increasing complexity rather than entropic decline, and its specific creativity is autopoietic rather than adaptive” (35). For example, Margulis and Sagan argue that “microbial evolution should be read as a succession of catastrophic pollution events” that stimulate life’s innovative capacities (qtd. in Cooper 36). “Life creates its own limits to growth only to expand beyond them” in ever-renewing biological processes of complexity (36). This theory places more emphasis on catastrophism as evolutionary theory than on Darwinian gradualism. Catastrophe events that punctuate gradual evolution prompt “fractal discontinuities” (38) and these discontinuities present themselves in Butler’s work as the triggers for new life.

Butler’s faith in the ability of life to overcome all limits to growth underpins the Oankali’s colonial enterprise. They operate in a new political economy of nature – one based on the generative force of biospheric evolution. Life is, therefore, best understood as a “process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end” (Cooper 38). This idea is evident in a scene from Adulthood Rites in which Akin leaves the Resister village of Phoenix and looks back to “see the smoke cloud behind them and Phoenix still burning” (517). For the Resisters, what Mars promises is a “continuation of the endless human pattern of alternating phoenix-like destruction and rebirth” (Johns 393). Crisis begets adaptation and improvisation – the Resisters must not only adapt but transform to survive. Butler emphasises the need to begin with the assumption of life, not death; of generation (of the new), not merely reproduction (of the same). Intrinsic to this is the sacrifice of an essentialist ‘human’ for the inevitably posthuman. When Lilith asks Jdahya what their children will become, he says: “different” (43), “better than either of us” (247). As Vint points out, “We never get to discover the fate of the Mars colony: perhaps it self-destructs as the Oankali predict, but hope that it will succeed remains” (77). This ambiguity is not an endorsement of apocalypse or environmental destruction but rather

recognition of the need for human and ecological transformation and the conditions under which it can occur.

The unlimited growth of life is reflected in the Oankali’s fascination with cancer. Cancer itself is pathological growth, defying the normal limits of cell differentiation – extraordinarily, it represents a surplus of life. Lilith’s talent for cancer is seen in terms of its evolutionary potential rather than its imperative to death. Cancer is productive for the Oankali precisely because it does not “submit to the limits of generational time and death and instead pursues its own relentless self-accumulation” (139). This resonates strongly with the Oankali’s perpetual symbiogenesis through the novel recombination of DNA.

It is important to note, however, that the Oankali do not only seek genetic material. While they are certainly interested in the human genome, they are also fascinated with human cultures:

Nikanj spoke very softly. ‘We revere life. We had to be certain we had found ways for you to live with the partnership, not simply to die of it.’

‘You don’t need us!’ Joseph said. ‘You’ve created your own human beings. Poor bastards. Make them your partners.’

‘We . . . do need you . . . A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape. But you’re more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. We’re interested in those too. That’s why we saved as many of you as we could.’ (153-4)

The symbiotic relationship between Oankali and human exceeds the strictly genetic terms of the trade, and suggests that human/Oankali

morphogenesis is a relational process. This interdependence is clear in Imago when the two construct ooloi, Jodahs and Aaor, discover they must live closely with human mates to avoid dissolving into formless matter. Their identities are contingent on their relationships with humans in a process that can be understood as yet another biological imperative towards collaborative diversification. Yet Butler again complicates any simple reading of this relationship by posing questions of authority: is it the ooloi who would not exist without human mates, or the humans who could not reproduce or enjoy sexual intimacy without the ooloi? Jennifer S. Nelson tackles the very idea of imago as perfected relationship to show that symbiosis is not a steady state but rather a complex system of feedback loops:

We need to deal with the idea that the imago, the ‘perfect stage’ of symbiosis, is (in) no singular state of being, isolated from the system’s feedback as if frozen in time. Instead, perfection is (in) the steady state of iteration that reproduces the symbiotic system . . . indefinitely. (96)

These feedback loops are not only genetic or material, but also discursive. Yet the discursive is also capable of generating new possibilities – in this case, the unique connections between humans and constructs. Akin sees potential in human flaws and new chances at life instead of an imperative to death. Akin and Jodahs are the ultimate posthumans who embody the potential for ongoing transformation. It is especially significant that Jodahs is an accident – an unplanned construct ooloi – which demonstrates that outcomes cannot always be dictated by genetic design and that variations in evolution must always be anticipated.

Inter-species posthumanism

Butler’s fictions offer fertile ground for exploring how the body can be liberated from the constraints of scientific, historical and economic

exploitation, and take on new meanings and potentialities. Such transformations are possible by reframing the way the human is understood as a morphogenic entity that exists within feedback loops with other species, rather than through reprogenetic technologies. For Peppers, “Butler proposes a world of interaction between the female body and the culture it is situated within” (39) – cultures that are always racialising assemblages, even when they are non-human cultures.

The duality between the self and the other, the human and the alien, is radically destabilised by the Oankali because of their ability to continually genetically alter themselves and their trade partners. The co-dependence of the two species who, through the trade, will create countless other species, suggests co-constitutive ways of approaching identity. In ‘Xenogenesis,’ Butler positions human identity as something flexible and manifold, rather than something defined by the juxtaposition of the self in relation to the other. In an Afrofuture-feminist move, she places this self/other dualism at the foundation of the political economy of reproduction because it hierarchises race and gender to shape markets for biological labour.

Melzer therefore reads ‘Xenogenesis’ in relation to postmodern feminist theory’s perceptions of selfhood – instead of “fragmentation” there is “multiplicity,” and in place of a “scattered and incoherent self” there are “fluid selves” (16). This also speaks to the often contradictory and disparate aspects within the self, and allows black women to speak “not only to the other but from the position as other (Melzer 38-9).

This multiplicity of selves offers productive ways of thinking the human beyond the present – the posthuman – within the body rather than without. N. Katharine Hayles is critical of disembodied views of posthumanism and insists that the fleshy material of human selves empowers women to transgress boundaries and resist exploitation. Given the racialised and gendered constructions of technoscience that operate

under imperialist discourses of mastery – of women, of nature – Hayles argues that the posthuman offers new possibilities. In Hayles’s view of posthumanism, a process of embodied, reflexive becoming replaces the liberal humanist vision of an objectivist teleology in which the body is merely a “support system for the mind” (288). Hayles’s posthumanism offers its own kind of oppositional consciousness – a form of “leverage to avoid reinscribing, and thus repeating,” the neoliberal manifesto to “dominate and control nature” (288).

The posthuman does not, therefore, signify the end of the human, just as Lilith’s participation in the trade does not nullify her own agency or subjectivity. However, it does signify the end of a particular construction of the human that has only ever applied to the “fraction of humanity” who are privileged enough by race, gender and wealth to “conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice” (Hayles 286). In ‘Xenogenesis,’ the figure of the posthuman embodied in the construct is, therefore, an Afrofuture-feminist critique of the liberal humanist view of the self that has eroded the personhood of ex- centric subjects. This construction of posthumanity simultaneously exposes the racialised conditions under which personhood has been denied and the difficulties of moving beyond, given the experiences, especially biologically, of black women. However, extending conceptions of the posthuman in the context of a world alive with biological feedback and exchange offers further exciting opportunities for thinking the self in relation to others.

Rosi Braidotti suggests that the posthuman is a useful tool for reconsidering the “basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthropocene’ and can also “help us re-think the basic tenets of our interaction with both human and non-human agents on a planetary scale” (5-6) – a concept that will be further elaborated in Chapter 3 of this dissertation. Braidotti highlights how the hybridisation of

life blurs boundaries between human and non-human, including animals, plants and bacteria. While this hybridisation sometimes occurs through the manipulation of the genetic codes by which humans understand life, it is not to be mistaken for an anthropogenic force.

In unlimited genealogies of human becoming, Braidotti theorises a “flow of relations with multiple others” (50). Drawing on postcolonial theory, she states that there is a clear and vital link between posthumanism and post- anthropocentrism, and advocates for a new critical posthumanism that transposes “hybridity, nomadism, diasporas and creolization processes” with new means of creating multi-species claims to “subjectivity, connections and community” (50). She terms this movement zoe, a constantly evolving system of affiliations and assemblages – the “transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains” – and positions this as a direct response to the financialisation of life under the logic of late capitalism (60). Braidotti situates the posthuman as a liberating force that addresses the “negativity and thanatopolitical dimension of biopolitical practices,” including life sciences (Herbrechter 5).

Butler’s posthumans become other through interactions with the Oankali and by surviving periods of dramatic ecological transformation. The posthuman is therefore not a techno-scientific development that can be commercialised, as most Western sf proposes, but is instead the self- organising and autopoietic movement of life itself, present in all living matter and certainly not exclusive to the human. Butler grasps the specific ways in which African-American women are positioned as biological subjects within inter-species networks. Through a politics of ambivalence, Butler demonstrates that biopolitical discourse around black bodies makes it almost impossible for women such as Lilith to escape techno-scientific control at the same time that the autopoietic qualities of life offer emancipatory possibilities. Nancy Jesser states that Butler’s women do not

give in to the enslavement of biology, but embrace the new connections made possible in the “powerful, emancipating intersubjective body” (56). Although the potential to embrace this intersubjectivity is certainly present in Butler’s work, she also emphasises the ways in which the mobilisation of life as capital continues to exploit black and brown bodies.

Black women’s bodies have often been the tools rather than the embodiment of a posthumanity – for example, in the case of Henrietta Lacks, and in the egg donation and surrogacy of African-American women. Thus, while the call for intersubjectivity or zoe as posthuman transformation certainly resonates with symbiogenesis between humans and Oankali in ‘Xenogenesis,’ Butler reinforces how biological intersubjectivity for black women is not always liberating or empowering, given their historical and biopolitical contexts. At the same time, Butler’s politics of ambivalence positions ‘Xenogenesis’ as fertile ground for exploring the ways in which black women’s bodies are constructed within Western culture. In both futures Butler presents – one with the Oankali, one on Mars – transformation is the catalyst and the requisite for survival. Transformation of the body as genetic data and as discursive construct is possible through re-constitution with other species and in other worlds, yet this also entails the sacrifice of fixed identities. Thus, while the series is certainly dystopian in scenario, its faith in the malleability of human identity nevertheless offers utopian possibility.

Haraway sees the world itself – the catastrophic, cacophonous world – as a “witty agent and actor” with the creation of new biopolitical futures turning on “revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse” (“Promises” 298). Butler’s work calls for new ways of existing within the world that no longer privilege the human with a voice but also see the natural world as a decisive actor with its own modes of articulation. It is a world of always-beginnings, never-endings, in which

the human is just a transitory biological form, dehierarchised and undetermined.

Conclusion

In ‘Xenogenesis,’ ooloi means “treasured stranger” (526). Such are the contradictions Butler, as an Afrofuture feminist, relishes in her writing – the malleability and monstrosity of life, the limitations and potential of human DNA, the accumulation of financial and biological futures. Butler’s writing addresses the promissory, speculative nature of the global bioeconomy through the ever-expanding biocolonialism of the alien Oankali, and traces its roots back through the exploitation of the black, gendered body. In doing so, she responds to the rise of ARTs, gene therapies and other life science industries in concert with the acceleration of the neoliberal economy, and its impact on black women’s bodies. While writers such as Margaret Atwood have addressed women and reproduction in sf, Butler provides an Afrofuturist perspective that is concerned with identity, agency and free will.

Butler’s work always investigates periods of transition – human to non- human, despair to hope, past to far-future. She reflects on the struggle for survival in volatile environments in sf narratives that also account for the experiences of black women within their biopolitical contexts. By directly addressing the construction of the black woman as hyper-sexualised, as negligent mother or as medical subject, Butler suggests ways in which black women can be freed from the discursive parameters of liberal Western discourse, and posits myriad possibilities for more fluid and relational theories of the body and the self.

Coda

Look at this child.

It doesn’t quite resemble her, but it isn’t unlike her either. She can feel the differences more than see them. It looks human. Ten fingers. Ten toes. A beautiful scrunched up baby face. On the surface, everything is where it should be. But it speaks to her through touch and it changes its appearance depending on who holds it. No one says it shouldn’t do this. On the contrary, everyone seems delighted.

Is she delighted? Well, yes – and no. It is her child, but it is also everyone’s child, and she can’t help but resent the sacrifice of that singular, maternal power. Motherhood. Her new body has both given her that and taken it away. She wonders if she will ever truly feel comfortable in her body, its extra abilities dictated by the new genetic codes given to her and then conditioned by this alien society. But then, isn’t her very worth in her difference? She is valued because she doesn’t fit in. If she were the same as them, they would not have bothered with the trade. She wonders what life would have been like if humans weren’t quite so hell-bent on destruction and hadn’t blasted each other to bits. Maybe in that alternate timeline she’s still married, still has a normal human son. Not this – this not-quite-human, boy-like thing that makes her wonder if she can ever love it as she should. Yes, her difference makes her valuable, but she thinks it is also making her a bad mother.

The child. What will the child be, when he grows up? No one can say. They are excited by the possibilities. She is not. She wants to know. She comes from a world of children’s growth percentiles and learning scaffolds and paediatric appointments. She was trained to ensure her child developed normally. The aliens say he will be better than either human or Oankali alone could ever be. She believes them. She has seen what they can do. But to her, better isn’t comforting.

She tells herself to stop thinking such human thoughts. The aliens are happy. The child is happy. She, too, should be happy. She is a new mother. For the second time. A different kind of new. Happiness is just a

state of mind. She remembers humans saying that. Therapists. The aliens have no therapists. Perhaps they outbred the genetic trait for mental illness. For the aliens, happiness isn’t a state of mind – it’s a state of becoming.

And really, who can be unhappy when there is the child, strange though he may be? They say he is not he yet. Not until its transformation. But she allows herself this human indulgence because it helps her remember her own son. She likes to think he still exists in some form, turned to carbon molecules, reworked into other life many times over. Happiness is a state of becoming. She repeats it to herself again and again as she nurses the child. Happiness is…

He wakes in her arms and his eyes darken. They remind her of her son’s. She can’t help but feel guilty even though the child automatically reprograms itself from the inside out to please everyone. In Oankali arms he becomes rounder, thicker, greyer. She hasn’t seen him grow extra limbs yet, though. She clings to this as a sign of his innate humanness. She is comforted by the thought that some part of him will always belong to her, and some part of her to him. When he is older, and more different to her than he is now, she will remember that and be glad, even as she looks around and wonders why she, she, was the one to lose everything. No. No. She has gained so much more, hasn’t she?

Look at this child.

Chapter 2

Spatial Palimpsest in South African Science Fiction: Imagining Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City and Rachel Zadok’s Sister-Sister

Prelude

It’s called the Cradle of Humankind, fifty kays northwest of Joburg. You’ve probably seen it in the ads, if you haven’t been there yourself. It’s a big green mound that rises out of the plain, the inkaba that popped out while we were gestating deep down below. We made it. It’s our place. Our birthplace.

We come out of the womb on that remote plain, bright-eyed and glistening with the placenta of the earth’s mantle. We pick the crust from our eyes and teeth as we look around, hungry for some vision, some history, some culture. So we begin to build.

There are some people living here already – tall sun-baked people who don’t speak our tongue. We consolidate them in special homelands so we’ll have all the room we need, first for our Cradle, and later for our Big City.

We work for a long time. We scatter bones around for the fossil caves and make sure there’ll be enough space for a spa and a brewery and a conference centre, and at least two or three really fancy hotels where they’ll change the towels every day. We spend a few mornings hunting animals and corralling them into a reserve with roads accessible by 4WD, and then we build a museum and fill it with wax dummies of people who look a little like us and a little like apes. We encase them behind glass and thousands of years of evolution, and build a gift shop and a theatre, and invite Harry the Hominid to exhibit there.

The little children love him. See that little boy there? He comes back again and again, working the controls, making the screens flash with images of Cro-Magnon Man, while a woman’s voice describes the hunting and gathering habits of early humans. Harry smiles at the boy, a sort of dim smile, so he seems like a giant pet rather than an ancestor. But he’s smarter than that. He has his own Twitter account. You can ask Harry questions about fossils and geology and all kinds of things, but his favourite topic is the Bone Detectives Tour. What a blast.

When we’ve done all we can in the Cradle, we board a hot air balloon and embark on a skyborne safari, to see what we can see, build what we can build. We land in a flat, dry place atop rivers of gold. As good a place as any to begin designing the future. The first thing we do is split the place in two, so if you look at it one way you see one thing, and if you look another way you see something totally different. If you really squint, sometimes you can see both at once. We build the mines and a church and a prison and a fort, and then we become more ambitious and move on to bigger and better things, weaving the layers together so they coalesce in certain places and you don’t have to squint. Like at the Hill. We make that place into a prison and a seat of government and a museum, and we design it for hidden suffering, but we also think there should be guided tours of democracy there, so we make some exhibitions on equality. Once that’s done, it’s time to move on to the neighbourhoods.

There are some bad foundations there but we build the sewers and the roads and the apartments. Then we wrap the whole place in police tape and leave it to develop on its own for a while. All places need a little room to grow. We can always rebrand it later, if we need to, under the guise of urban revitalisation.

When that’s done we hide our work, and we begin to inhabit the other- spaces, not the public or private spaces, not the black or white places, or the men’s or women’s places, but the imaginary and the forgotten spaces

– the places beneath and in-between. Abandoned spaces. Improvised spaces. Ceremonial spaces.

We settle ourselves in deep, and wait to see what will happen.

Introduction

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the growth of AfroSF – the science fictional mode of a broader Afrofuturism – is perhaps most notable in South Africa. Within the last decade, sf writers such as Lauren Beukes, Sarah Lotz and Charlie Human have garnered commercial and critical attention, and in sf film, Neill Blomkamp has achieved international success with District 9 (2009), Elysium (2013) and Chappie (2015).24 While much South African sf is concerned with apartheid, apocalypse, and state or corporate power, one of the most intriguing yet overlooked aspects of the genre, especially in this formerly segregated nation, is its literary geography.

This chapter argues that two recent South African AfroSF novels – Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) and Zadok’s Sister-Sister (2013) – write Johannesburg as a spatial palimpsest that reveals the city’s class, race and gender stratification. While a palimpsest is usually conceived of as the horizontal layering of text or images, in this chapter it refers to the “vertical dimension” (Scott 1853) of the city, from its stormwater drains to its skyscrapers, which reflects the race and class hierarchies inscribed upon its geography. As David L. Pike states, there can be no surface without an underground, and in both Zoo City and Sister-Sister, the underground comprises more than the city’s subterranean systems – it also relates to an underclass of people. In imagining the city as a palimpsest, Beukes and Zadok both expose and subvert the hegemonic spatiality of the city, from the legislation of segregated space under apartheid to the concentration of poor, black people in inner-city slums. They make visible the hidden or forgotten layers of the city and transform

24 South African producers are consolidating this niche by buying film rights to AfroSF, including Beukes’s Zoo City – further evidence of the genre’s widespread appeal.

them into spaces of adaptation and resistance. In doing so, they evoke the dynamic interplay of the urban and the textual, the material and the imagined, and the superstitious and the rational, in postcolonial geographies.

Beukes and Zadok situate Johannesburg as a contested space in which the city’s built environments are ideological constructions. Yet these environments are also open to reimagination. The novels expand the spatial, textual and ontological boundaries of Johannesburg from the perspectives of their black female protagonists. The characters of Zinzi, Thuli and Sindi reshape Johannesburg’s geography through transgressive spatial practices that reveal the constant erasure, effacement and ephemerality of space, guided by a “radical principle of recuperation and construction” (Williams Combined 31).

Henri Lefebvre believes the imagined qualities of space open it to transformation by those who are subject to the urban apparatuses of power. “[P]lans and programs imposed from above” are thwarted by “grassroots opposition, in the form of counter-plans and projects” that reinterpret and repurpose inherited spaces (383). Lefebvre argues that all citizens have a right to the city, a right to difference, and that reimagining space is the key to its transformation: “To change life is to change space; to change space is to change life” (qtd. in Merrifield 108).

Beukes and Zadok transform the city from below in ways that critique what is imposed from above. Their literary geographies enact Edward Soja’s theory of Thirdspace, which understands that space is an imagined construct composed of a “trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality” (5). Soja defines Thirdspace as the “space common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood” (56) – a theory that resonates strongly with Bloch’s concept of Heimat, the ultimate space of fulfilment toward which all future-thinking strives (to be discussed further in Chapter 3). While Johannesburg in Zoo City and Sister-Sister is certainly

not a utopia – in fact, the texts are often deemed dystopian – Beukes and Zadok nevertheless suggest new and different futures for the city that require spatial articulation, revealing another permutation of the Afrofuturist imagination.

Thirdspace embraces the imaginative dimensions of space. While Firstspace refers to the “concrete materiality of spatial forms” – the objective, material and formal elements of space (Soja 75) such as buildings, gardens and streets – and Secondspace to representations of space – such as plans for redevelopment projects – Thirdspace is more elusive. It is a “secret and conjured object, filled with illusions and allusions” (56). It is more than the combination of Firstspace and Secondspace, though it reinvigorates both through its limitlessness. Thirdspace is based on an awareness of the trialectics of spatiality- historicality-sociality, and thus comprises:

a knowable and unknowable, real and imagined lifeworld of experiences, emotions, events, and political choices that is existentially shaped by the generative and problematic interplay between centers and peripheries, the abstract and concrete, the impassioned spaces of the conceptual and the transformation of (spatial) knowledge into (spatial) action in a field of unevenly developed (spatial) power. (Soja 31)

As a space in which other-spaces are imagined, postcolonial sf rehearses a utopian theory and praxis of the city. In their novels, Beukes and Zadok collapse material and subjective experiences of Johannesburg. Their protagonists work from the margins – the streets, the slums and the drains – to navigate areas specifically designed to exclude or control them. Their experiences of being-in-the-city reveal the urban dimensions of race, class and gender segregation that pervade the city’s colonial layers. At the same time, they reveal how these spaces can be transformed through a “critical spatial imagination” (Soja 31).

Beukes and Zadok are particularly interested in the marginal position of female subjects within the city.25 The liminal spaces of Johannesburg’s underground in Zoo City and Sister-Sister destroy the public/private, male/female binary of the city. By moving between its vertical layers, Beukes and Zadok suggest that the city is a living network of relations in which space is always provisional and therefore open to reinterpretation. Their novels reflect Gillian Rose’s theory of space as “a matrix of play, dynamic and iterative, its forms and shapes produced through the citational performance of self-other relations” (248).

Beukes and Zadok explore the spatialisation of patriarchy and their protagonists work from the margins to which they have been relegated, transforming them into sites of resistance. Bell hooks writes that choosing the margins as a “space of radical openness” allows ex-centric subjects to “cross the boundaries and double-cross the boundaries of race, gender, class, and all oppressively Othering categories” (84). This transforms an enforced marginality into a counter-hegemonic position – the margin then becomes a “site of creativity and power” from which to assert the self (152). In Zoo City and Sister-Sister, the Thirdspaces of Johannesburg’s underground in particular unfold oppositional spatial subjectivities. Within these sites of exclusion or invisibility, Beukes and Zadok explore the frontiers of a new spatial imaginary.

This chapter comprises four sections: first, establishing Johannesburg as a palimpsest that exposes the interplay of ideology and utopia; second, addressing the subterranean spaces of the city in Zoo City and Sister- Sister and how they function as part of the palimpsest; third, examining

25 Feminist scholars such as Mona Domosh and Joni Seager argue that masculinist geographies are clearly evident in cities, from suburban sprawl that marginalises women in the home to exclusive design that fails to support the increased participation of women in the workplace. The very division of space into public and private spheres is a gendered construction, with women aligned with the domestic space of the home. Liz Bondi recognises that such dichotomies do not accurately describe the city but are ideologies representing a patriarchal idealisation of space.

the relations between the city and the body; and fourth, looking at how belief in the occult creates hybrid and intertextual spaces.

Like its predecessors, this chapter is book-ended by fictional experiments that map the city in response to Beukes’s and Zadok’s Afrofuturist literary geographies. The narrative situates the city as a collaborative and imaginative project – a Thirdspace. Both the critical and fictional elements of the chapter are guided by the understanding that, like Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, all places exist only through the imagination – if “every social community reproduced by the function of institutions is imaginary,” then, “in certain conditions, only imaginary communities are real” (Balibar 346).

Johannesburg as spatial palimpsest: utopia and ideology

Before discussing how Beukes and Zadok write the layers of the city, it is necessary to situate Johannesburg as a site of continual reimagination26 informed by both ideological and utopian forces. South Africa has constantly been reimagined – for example, as the City of Gold, a white supremacist state, and the Rainbow Nation. However, the narrative of reconciliation that guides the modern nation-state too often ignores the deeply engrained spatial divisions and hierarchies that persist today and are depicted in the literary geographies of Beukes and Zadok.

Constitution Hill is one example of a space in which multiple visions of the nation are inscribed upon Johannesburg, creating a palimpsest that reveals the racialised geography of the city. Bill Ashcroft argues that

26 Inhabited by indigenous people prior to the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1886, Johannesburg rapidly developed into a mecca for migrant workers from all over Africa and later became a colonial state under the British following the South African War (1899-1902). Race and class divisions established during the colonial period with the segregation of black and white labourers were later written into law, beginning with the Group Areas Act in 1948 that saw the forced relocation of black populations into inner city areas such as Sophiatown and Soweto. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, racial integration has increased, but the city remains deeply segregated, particularly in former townships designated for non-whites such as Soweto (Parry and van Eeden 47).

Constitution Hill reveals the ways in which ideology and utopia intertwine to create a new myth for the nation’s regeneration. Built on a hill first used in 1892 as a prison for the mixed-race labour force under the Zuid- Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR or Transvaal Republic), Constitution Hill was later transformed into a fort during the South African War to both deter the British invasion and act as a panopticon for ZAR guards to survey foreign labourers in the mining camp below. In the early twentieth century, Constitution Hill became the notorious Number Four Prison, holding inmates such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Today, the old ramparts of the fort afford views of Johannesburg, from the inner city (typically thought of as poor, black and criminal) to the northern suburbs (white, wealthy and safe). The site was officially opened as the Constitutional Court on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2004, and, aside from the nation’s supreme seat of justice, also contains much of the original prison and fort, preserved as memorials that, according to then- President Thabo Meki, represent a break from the nation’s “despotic and tyrannical past” (qtd. in Ashcroft ‘Constitution’ 94). It seems clear, however, that the development of the site indicates not a break from but, rather, a reinterpretation of the past in service of a national myth of justice, equality and unity.

Johannesburg has long been a palimpsest that is “constantly reinscribed, erased, and reinscribed again” (Soja 18), especially through nation- building discourses that reimagine the past, as with Constitution Hill. Paul Carter asserts that historical events take place on a stage and are selected, narrated and ordered to perform History (xiv). Perceptions of place are ordained by what has been written and performed on that stage, which he sees as a “self-reinforcing illusion” (xv) that aims not to interpret but to legitimise the status quo (xvi). In postcolonial nations (Carter’s writing centres on Botany Bay), History ignores the “material uncertainties of lived space and time” (xvi) and flattens complex spatial subjectivities to serve new geographic mythographies.

In contrast to a linear reading of Johannesburg as History, interpreting the city as a palimpsest recognises the diverse spatial experiences layered throughout the city’s urban framework. Space as palimpsest is a constant reconfiguration of past, present and future, unsettling the monological performance of History. Yet the palimpsest also reflects the layers – the verticality – of Johannesburg’s built environment and its racial hierarchies, particularly at sites such as Constitution Hill, which were designed specifically to reinforce white, colonial authority.

Reading the city as palimpsest also reveals how ideological and utopian thinking shapes narratives of the nation-state. While utopia and ideology have usually been regarded as antithetical – the former envisaging what is new and different and the latter reinforcing what already exists – Bloch identifies a utopian element within ideology that presents the image of a better life, giving it its appeal. Ashcroft identifies this relationship between ideology and utopia at work at Constitution Hill, and discusses the ways in which memory is both invoked to legitimise the “utopian vision of justice” and repressed in the service of “continuing inequality” (99). The Hill stands as a clear example of how space is manipulated in the service of state ideology, yet still contains utopian seeds of potential that indicate new possibilities for the nation. This tension is one that permeates the city and is unavoidable in any literary geography of Johannesburg.27 Indeed, this tension between utopianism and ideology is perhaps another marker of the Afrofuturist mode that is often played out in the context of urban

27 According to Philip E. Wegner, such tensions are characteristic of the modern nation- state, which he sees as an imagined community. Wegner argues that when the notion of the modern nation emerged, it was built upon the images projected by narrative utopias, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia. These literary utopias were experiments in “working out the particular shapes and boundaries” (Wegner, xvi) of the nation-state, and are marked by their spatial borders – their remoteness, their difference, their exclusivity. Indeed, even predating More, most utopias took the form of cities (e.g. Plato’s Republic, Homer’s Phaeacia, the Judeo-Christian city of god), and modern dystopias have similarly taken urban form: Zamyatin’s One State, Huxley’s London, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. For Wegner, the “imaginary communities of the narrative utopia” influenced the form and limit of the nation-state (xvi), helping the nation-state become the “agent and locus of much of modernity’s histories” (xvii).

geographies, with power and privilege expressed in spatial configurations, as in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), in which Toronto’s elites barricade themselves in exclusive suburbs as the inner city becomes a hub of violence and poverty, ruled by crime lord Rudy Sheldon from the heights of the CN Tower.

While Beukes, Zadok, Hopkinson and other AfroSF writers certainly do not present Johannesburg or other cities as utopias, they are concerned with how both ideological and utopian discourses of the nation and modernity shape space. Postcolonial sf reveals how space is experienced by ex-centric others – its segregation and its surveillance, but also its transgression and its malleability – and speculates on how space can be reimagined to offer new possibilities beyond ideology. For Beukes and Zadok, a utopian spatial praxis necessitates moving away from the “classical, modern formulation of Euclidean territorial units . . . on contiguous maps” to write the “vertical into their notions of power” (Graham “Vertical” 20). Their novels reveal the reveal what Bruce Willems-Braun terms “buried epistemologies” and Leah M. Gibbs dubs “deep colonising” based on the centrality of geography to imperialism. Beukes and Zadok position geography as another kind of racialising assemblage, based on the desire to “reclaim, rename and reinhabit the land,” characteristic of the coloniser (Said 274). In Zoo City and Sister- Sister, subterranean spaces expose the vertical dimension of postcolonial urban landscapes and can also be appropriated in ways that transform them from buried history into marginal sites of resistance that hooks sees as radical in their openness.

Subterranean spaces in Zoo City and Sister-Sister

Subterranean spaces are central to the literary geography of Zoo City and Sister-Sister. This is not coincidental but rather confirms the significant role they have played in the development of Johannesburg as a metropolis and South Africa as a modern nation-state. Achille Mbembe and Sarah

Nuttall argue that the “vertical and racial segmentation of the Johannesburg urban world” is structured by “what is relegated beneath,” and that “more than the surfaces of the vertical city with its skyscrapers, the underground seems to hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of its modernity” (22).

Zinzi in Zoo City and Thuli and Sindi in Sister-Sister reveal the contiguous colonial structures that connect past to present in the persistence of separatist structures such as underground train networks and stormwater drains. All three characters are skilled navigators of the vertical dimension of the postcolonial urban landscape, delving beneath the city’s surfaces to investigate sewers, subways and drains that offer potential passage or refuge. Yet in their subversion of the original means for which these structures were designed and built, the characters suggest that their purposes, imagined and actual, are not fixed but rather adaptive and improvisational.

In Subterranean Cities, Pike describes how underground systems such as drainage systems and storage vaults of the modern city create a vertical space that alters the ways in which the city is both lived and theorised. From caverns and mines to contemporary subways, the underground has a significant place in the modern imaginary – sometimes threatening, sometimes revolutionary – that constitutes a mythic Thirdspace in the modern city (Pike), including Johannesburg.

Underground spaces have played a significant role in South Africa’s history and development, and continue to inform thinking about modernity. Gold and diamond mines led to the rapid growth of Johannesburg, (hence its moniker of Egoli or the City of Gold) and contributed to its present status as the largest economy in Africa. In Cape Town, tourists can take adventure tours of the underground tunnels that were first built to carry fresh water to the city and later developed into sewage systems. Beneath Johannesburg, networks of secret tunnels and conveyor belts were used

first by the postal service and then as passageways to transport prisoners to and from Constitution Hill during the apartheid era.

But the underground in Johannesburg is not simply buried history. It is a palimpsest of evolving spatial-historical-social relations. The underground has historically been a place of hidden suffering as well as resistance, especially of anti-apartheid movements, and this significance is reinforced by both Beukes and Zadok. In Beukes’s Johannesburg, not only do underground spaces (and what they represent or remember) inform that which resides on the surface, they also serve a practical purpose in unlocking access to the city for its marginalised subjects, including the protagonist Zinzi.

Zoo City is billed as a “muti28 noir” novel (Stobie 374) and is set in a futuristic Johannesburg where a mysterious phenomenon bonds individuals who have committed serious felonies to an animal that spontaneously appears at their side following their crime. These individuals are known as ‘aposymbiots,’ ‘apos,’ ‘zoos’ or ‘the animalled’. Aside from inheriting an animal familiar – which include mammals, birds and insects – aposymbiots also receive special psychic abilities, or shavi.

The young black female protagonist of Zoo City, Zinzi December, is an aposymbiot who gains a sloth as her animal familiar after her actions as a drug addict contribute to her brother’s death. Zinzi’s shavi is a talent for finding lost objects, which she puts to use locating items for wealthier white clients. She supplements this income by participating in 419 scams that also help her to pay off her creditors.

As an aposymbiot, Zinzi is an outsider. Aposymbiots are seen as “murderers, rapists, junkies. Scum of the earth” (8-9). Unable to find accommodation after prison, she winds up in Zoo City, a riff on the inner city suburb of Hillbrow, home to ex-convicts, migrant workers, refugees

28 Indigenous medicine

and other outsiders, especially aposymbiots. Zoo City-as-Hillbrow is a fascinating example of the improvisation of space. Originally designed as a middle class ‘Whites Only’ area under apartheid, it is now inhabited by the poor, the unemployed and, overwhelmingly, black South Africans. Plagued by population density, crime and poverty, Zoo City is characterised by transgression, beginning with its residents’ very presence in this formerly white neighbourhood. They take shortcuts, jerry-rig electricity, sell illegal goods by day and walk the streets at night. Although it is a space of enforced marginalisation, Zoo City also brings people together by creating a sense of community among outsiders who collectively reimagine a space originally designed to exclude them.

People who would happily speed through Zoo City during the day won’t detour here at night, not even to avoid police roadblocks. They’re too scared, but that’s precisely when Zoo City is at its most sociable. From 6 pm, when the day-jobbers start getting back from whatever work they’ve been able to pick up, apartment doors are flung open. Kids chase each other down the corridors. People take their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other’s bums. The smell of cooking – mostly food, but also meth – temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells. The crack whores emerge from their dingy apartments to chat and smoke cigarettes on the fire-escape, and catcall the commuters heading to the taxi rank on the street below. (132)

While Zoo City is by no means a utopian state, it is nevertheless an example of the oppositional occupation of space, standing as a counterpoint to the wealthier white neighbourhoods of Killarney and Mid Rand that Zinzi visits as part of her investigation into the disappearance of the teenage twins of pop group iJusi, S’bu and Songweza. The verticality of

the city extends from the heights of Zoo City, with its abandoned apartments, fire escapes and improvised walkways, down to the stormwater drains and tunnels. If the underground is typically associated with an underclass of people, then by occupying both the depths and the heights of the city, Beukes indicates that the city’s marginal subjects cannot remain hidden or silent and, instead, spill over and rework spaces of closure and control to assert their presence and agency.

Moving between Johannesburg’s layers, Zinzi improvises space and, in doing so, uncovers the layers of history inscribed in the city’s built environments. When Zinzi visits the Mai Mai healers’ markets, she is forced to flee from a group of young squatters who want to amputate her sloth’s arm for black market muti. The squatters have excavated a tunnel down to a stormwater drain from the rear of their den, and this is where Zinzi makes her escape. She drops down a “jagged hole” into the drains below, searching for a central flow that will provide maintenance access back to street level. She comes across a staircase that serves as a meeting point, “several tributaries convening on the steps” (209) and a “vaulted ceiling stretch[ing] like a cathedral” beyond. Walking along the canal, she slips and is pushed by the flow of water into an alcove, “the modern cement giving way to ancient brickwork . . . a Victorian relic from the town’s golden days” (209). Although she’s no stranger to the tunnels, having searched them many times for lost objects, she finds herself in unfamiliar territory. “The tunnels are a scramble of pitch-black termite holes, some of them narrowing away to nothing, like whoever was digging them got bored and wandered off” (212). After hours of stumbling through the labyrinth of passageways, she turns a corner “into blinding artificial light” to the “whip of glass and metal,” almost stumbling right into the Gautrain (214).

This underground network recalls the real-life tunnels of Johannesburg’s Park Station in its historical, political and cultural spatialities. As in the

underground tunnels of Zoo City, beneath Park Station there are unused passageways where old posters advertise products as diverse as South African airways, the 41st Rand Easter Show and Christian Scientists. In the 1990s, Nelson Mandela launched a new concept for the station, Park City, which proposed to do away with segregated entrances and platforms to revise the image of Park Station as a “symbol of a divided Johannesburg, cut in two by a river of steel made up of railway lines and unfriendly buildings” (Mandela qtd. in Brodie n.p.). Increasingly, the tunnels have taken on significance in the public imagination. A recent eNews Channel Africa story, for example, discussed the tunnels’ potential as a tourist attraction and their conservation significance.

These Firstspace and Secondspace iterations of Park Station also inform its construction as a Thirdspace of fluid meaning. The tunnels Zinzi finds herself in before stumbling across the train reflects this multi- dimensionality, with the images of “termite holes” contrasting sharply with the Victorian brickwork of the city’s “golden days” and the modern cement. The city’s underground simultaneously reflects a modern stratification, with the squatters burrowing into its depths, at the same time as any social divisions that exist underground are loosened by the contemporaneous evidence of previous versions of the city. As Louise Bethlehem states, the literary geography of Zoo City circulates within Johannesburg in a flow of exchanges, going far beyond static representation (524).

Beukes’s underground network also reveals the interlocking temporalities of modernity – the incursion of the old on the new and vice versa. For Shane Graham, these motifs of subterranean space and its transformation speak to the “anxieties and fears that pervade the imagination of postapartheid, post-transition city dwellers and their attitudes toward modernity and the incursion of newness” (66). These anxieties and fears contribute to an urban unconscious – an accumulation of the city’s c0llective historical memories – that is visible through architecture, design

and other cultural fragments, such as the advertisements in the alcove of Park Station or the vaulted ceilings at the tributary of the drains. Yet this urban unconscious is composed of more than fear and anxiety. There is also a utopian dimension to the way in which space is reimagined and remade.

Zinzi defies fixed borders, renews memory and repurposes closed spaces to achieve her ends. Zinzi, the squatters and Zoo City’s residents act as “conscious architects” (Harvey 159) of Thirdspaces that defy the closure of the city, salvaging what lies outside institutionalised space. By reclaiming subterranean spaces as a way of moving through the city, earning money and getting to safety, Zinzi also brings to light the troubled histories that linger there – histories that complicate the (post)colonial narratives of openness, inclusion and equality that reside on the surface.

The inequalities that lurk just beneath the urban surface are revealed in Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008). Beukes writes Cape Town as a complex mix of state/corporate power that rests on top of a hidden underclass, exemplified in buildings such as the Ghost headquarters, which are accessible by underground passageways that Kendra describes as “tunnels on a skin of seawater . . . in the clankering watery bowels at Cape Town – like all the effluent in this city. Like me” (7). The layers of the city are carefully constructed in some areas to accommodate poverty and to turn it into a commodified spectacle. For example, past the middle-class suburbs of Obs, Rosebank, Pinelands and Langa, Tendeka notes how the “loxion sprawl proper” begins with “cosy apartment blocks” lining the highway as a “Potemkin for tourists” (42). This façade disguises, just a few blocks back, the “real deal” of “tin shacks and the old miners’ hostels and the converted containers” that are all that is left of the shopping industry which has “died together with the economy” (42). This is where tourists come to “get their taste of poverty and . . . maybe some love muti from the sangoma,” however, they never venture “deep into the heart of it, which

means they’re missing out on the drop toilets and spiderwebs of illegal electricity connections” (42). While Tendeka’s friend Ash thinks that places like the barbershop strip, the shebeen and the boxing society have created a “sense of community” and “transformation” in these poor urban areas, Tendeka disagrees, calling Ash’s ideas a “total wank” and pointing out that “people are just as economically fucked as they were before,” with crackdowns that are “just as bad as those bad old days when the police came storming in to quarantine and deport whole neighbourhoods” (43).

In other AfroSF stories, such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), the underground represents a space from which to reimagine the world. In Lagoon, an alien who can remake matter at the molecular level emerges from the ocean as ambassador for her people. It is from the depths of the ocean that the alien species exerts their influence, and from the bottom up – from the lowest levels of life in the ocean through to marine predators such as dolphins and squid, and from there across Nigeria, to Ghana and around the world – that this species encourages new ways of opening up to and co-existing with others: alien, human and animal. Okorafor and Beukes both reveal how urban geography is a racialising assemblage that, despite the hegemonic spatialisation of cities and the geographic stratification of rich and poor, white and non-white, is subject, through fiction, to the de/reterritorialization of the Afrofuturist imagination.

Subterranean spaces are also significant in Zadok’s Sister-Sister, although Zadok’s future Johannesburg is drastically different to Beukes’s. While Johannesburg through Zinzi’s eyes is deeply segregated, violent and dangerous, it is still a vibrant metropolis that contains spaces of resistance and potential. In contrast, Zadok’s Johannesburg has fallen into decay, and orphaned twin sisters Thuli and Sindi wander the city scavenging to survive in a dreamlike world of highways and late night pit stops, remote

kraals29 in drought-stricken lands, and underground tunnels throbbing with the ghosts of dead children. A strong sense of entropy pervades the built spaces of the novel – the toll plazas, the underground tunnels, the roads – as Zadok weaves together the spatial practices of inhabitants past and present to reimagine Johannesburg.

Sister-Sister takes place in a near-future South Africa marked by drought and poverty. Thuli and Sindi have been inseparable from childhood and regard themselves as two halves of a whole, but after a series of traumatic events drives a rift between them, Sindi becomes convinced that she has no soul and must steal her sister’s in order to be saved. After Thuli dies, she remains bound to Sindi by the shared soul, and living sister and ghost sister walk the city together, surviving only by scavenging and begging.

Once again, stormwater drains serve as a site of memory and reimagining in Sister-Sister. Once ferrying stormwater from the city streets out to sea, the drains have dried up with the drought, yet they do not lie empty or forgotten. The spaces themselves are imbued with a flesh-like memory – the walls are “bone-dry” but still smell of water and the tunnels are “full of ghosts” who reach out and touch Thuli as she passes with “wet hands, dripping-dripping” (44). While these tunnels are spaces salvaged as ‘dorms’ for Ma Wilma and her gang of homeless youths, they also have a darker history as a dumping ground for dead bodies, including that of Thuli and Sindi’s schoolmate, Dora. Passing through the tunnels seeking safety in Ma Wilma’s commune, Thuli recalls how, when she was nine, Dora disappeared and her body washed out of the vlei30 weeks later after strong rain. As Thuli walks the haunted spaces of the stormwater drains, they sing a song back to her:

Dora Xplora dead in the drain Waiting-waiting, waiting for the rain

29 A kraal is traditionally a cattle enclosure but also refers to indigenous villages in South Africa 30 Shallow marsh, often seasonal

One week, two week, three four five Auntie prays that Dora’s still alive (45)

Dora Xplora face-down in the vlei Barefoot, no socks, her shoes got washed away Her satchel strap still wrapped around her throat Daai ding kon nie swim but vetkoek floats (51)31

Zadok’s novel reveals the ways in which things disintegrate, circulate and reformulate unpredictably, troubling the idea of the modern, progressive city. For Zadok, built things can always be repurposed: the girls use the highway to walk the city; they sneak into a gated community to find food; they hide in the stormwater drains to escape violence. Yet the city also seems haunted. Voices speak from the drains and homeless people wander the streets like ghosts under the full moon. In Zadok’s Johannesburg, vivid memories well up from the repressed spaces below, with the depths troubling what lies on the surface. These disruptive traces, or what Bloch terms Spuren, are defined by their unknown or inexplicable quality – “[impressions] that will not let us come to rest” (Traces 6). Such traces are utopian fragments capable of fracturing the appearance of things – they can “tear, disrupt, overturn” (Korstvedt n.p.). In Sister-Sister, these traces are the immaterial stuff of the city’s history – its ghosts, its myths, its buried traumas – that recur throughout the novel and accentuate the impermanence of things. The subterranean spaces that haunt the surface and the memories that leach into the present suggest that everything will be erased, built over and remade. Yet in signifying such impermanence, Zadok also gestures toward what Homi Bhabha terms the ‘beyond’.

Bhabha states that while the present is marked by a “tenebrous sense of survival” (1) that cannot see past its own borderlines, the beyond produces “complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and

31 Dora the Explorer is a popular children’s television show in which a young Hispanic girl goes on adventures and solves puzzles along the way.

outside, inclusion and exclusion” (2). The beyond, like Bloch’s utopian futures, is never completely new because it contains traces of the past. It is marked by a “sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction” as well as “an exploratory, restless movement” (2). In Sister-Sister, the disruptive traces of the city work from subterranean memory and disturb the calm surface in a “restless movement” beyond the unknowable boundaries of the present toward an “intervening space . . . a revisionary time” (10). What lies beneath or behind shapes that which is above and beyond in both Zoo City and Sister-Sister, rethinking how cities transform the “dregs of history [they] inherit against [their] will” (Williams Combined 31). This process of recuperation and transformation reflects Bloch’s theory of the importance of transferring past and present knowledges into the future to guide utopian thinking.

Bloch uses the term anamnesis to signify recollection – which leaves the past intact and static – whereas anagnorisis – recognition – denotes an affirmation of how the past links to the present and the future, shaping the New – the utopian horizon that emerges through anticipatory consciousness. Thus, “the new is never completely new for us because we bring with us something to measure it by . . . It approaches us from our own past and must prove that it is genuine” (Landmann 178). Anagnorisis is a process of transforming memory into new visions of the future and thus is also an ideological struggle that (as discussed at the beginning of this chapter) plays out in public discourse around the image of the nation.

The Johannesburg imagined by Beukes and Zadok grapples with the dregs of its colonial past in still-segregated urban environments. By working from the periphery and evoking the traces, or Spuren, that linger in the city’s subterranean levels, they engage in an Afrofuturist praxis by transforming hidden or forgotten spaces into realms of potential that critique, and offer the possibility of transforming, what lies above. This transformation is only possible because both authors situate the city

primarily as an imagined space. Particularly in Sister-Sister, the city is also a liminal space that crosses back and forth between the material and the immaterial, and thus collapses any meaningful distinction of what is real, mimetic or reliable, and what is magical, metaphorical or the fabrication of the narrator. Philip Kuberski poses the idea of unconscious cities – the imagined cities that always exist in relation to, yet are also capable of displacing, real cities.32 While for Kuberski a “distinct stratification separates unconscious expectations and associations” (681) from the lived experience of the city, Zadok demonstrates how cities are first and always imaginary – they cannot exist outside of the unconscious.

The unconscious city is therefore an apocryphal entity in Sister-Sister, and to exist in Zadok’s Johannesburg is to wrestle with the uneasiness, the restlessness and the ephemerality that stems from its innumerable imaginings. Yet here, too, there is utopian potential in the city that exists principally through imagination. The unconscious city is, necessarily, a Thirdspace, and as such can critique its Firstspace and Secondspace iterations – indeed, this is the effect of Thirdspace, to create the possibility of “extraordinary openness” and “critical exchange” (Soja 5).

Both Beukes’s and Zadok’s Afrofuturist literary geographies grasp how space, especially subterranean space, reflects the vertical dimensions of Johannesburg. In their characters’ appropriation of space, they inscribe the city with new layers in a constantly evolving palimpsest. They explore spaces beneath and beyond hegemonic space, weaving together the historical, social and spatial forms of Johannesburg to reflect its postcolonial modernity.

32 China Miéville’s fictional city of city of Besźel /Ul Qoma in The City and The City (2009) is an intriguing example of how two unconscious cities co-exist within the same physical space. While the cities occupy overlapping geographical spaces, they are deeply segregated in the carefully attuned minds of their inhabitants. Citizens of Besźel wilfully unsee the people, places and events of Ul Qoma and vice versa. The city can perhaps be read as an allegory for the unconscious cities that, at various times, have existed in deeply divided places such as Jerusalem and Berlin.

For Zinzi, Thuli and Sindi, movement between the city’s layers is essential to survival. Beukes and Zadok create an embodied experience of the city that reveals its gendered dimensions. They also explore how different types of bodies – the pregnant, HIV-infected or animalled body – are regulated through space, to the extent that social space is defined by the body.

The embodied city: feminist geographies

In Sister-Sister, Thuli and Sindi exist primarily in the public spaces of the Ring Road and the roadside diner. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, public spaces are typically aligned with masculinist qualities of public life, activity and authority. Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur – the gentleman stroller who observes city life and is embraced as part of its sociality – exemplifies this gendered view of public space. Thuli and Sindi, in contrast, are outsiders who walk the Ring Road begging for food from those stuck in traffic, and sneak into townhouse complexes to pilfer from private homes. Despite their inhabitation of public spaces, the twins are invisible, forced to live in the city’s blind spots.

Zadok reveals the gendering of space and enacts a feminist geography, questioning normative ideas of men’s and women’s places based on the understanding that space and gender are mutually constitutive, yet also dynamic. Rose argues that women are spatially restricted, subject to a masculinist geography that confines their movements, such as suburban sprawl that marginalises them to the feminine and domestic spaces of the private home. This division between the public (masculine) and the private (feminine) is closely related to women’s heightened sense of embodiment and their awareness of other gazes on them in the public sphere that only reinforces the knowledge that such spaces are not their own.33 In Sister- Sister, the twins inhabit a paradoxical space. They are forced to survive in

33 Joyce Davidson points to agoraphobia – a disorder suffered primarily by and attributed to women – as an example of the ways in which the gendered experience of space is one of restriction and exclusion.

public places, but also rendered invisible by and within those places. They are both imprisoned inside the city and excluded by it. Although walking the city is dangerous for the girls, they nevertheless find within their strange pedestrian rituals at least a temporary means of survival, revealing the regulatory principles of masculinist space.

Zadok’s performance of space thus differs from Beukes’s. While both certainly highlight the gendering of space, Beukes seems to celebrate the latent potential of unused and appropriated space. Zinzi works from the margins in order to salvage space and turn it to her own purposes. She is a “survival entrepreneur” (Barnard) – adaptable, resourceful, skilled at watching and moving through the city on foot and by car. She encounters the city “as a lived complexity,” seeking “alternative narratives and maps based on wandering” (Nuttall 748).

In Sister-Sister, however, Thuli and Sindi do not have the same privilege; instead, they take a survivalist approach to space that resonates with Lilith’s tactics of resistance in ‘Xenogenesis’. For the twins, to walk is to persevere. The margins are not spaces of potential for them but, instead, often represent new dangers. There are no lucky escapes or safe havens. Their vulnerability is made clear when Sindi is thrown out of Ma Wilma’s community in the stormwater drains and sold to the Believers’ church where, it is implied, she will participate in The Ascension of the Mothers for the New Mankind. The church does not represent salvation but rather another form of subjugation. While it is never made explicit, this ‘ascension’ seems to involve the acquisition of healthy girls without HIV to mother children who will also be free of the virus. Thrown from the belly of the city with its squatters into an eccentric organisation that will appropriate her body for its own ends, Sindi struggles to find agency without being able to situate herself within a space of resistance.

Even the girls’ bodies are not their own. Again, like Lilith’s in ‘Xenogenesis,’ Thuli’s body is a key site of contestation. When she becomes

pregnant after her uncle rapes her, she is beaten by her mother and thrown out of the house. Thuli is made suddenly and painfully aware of her newfound existence as a pregnant woman by others in the community who condemn or shun her. The pregnant body always destabilises boundaries between biological and social body, individual and state body, and public and private body, because it is subject to laws and regulations mandated by government. It is “decentred, split, or doubled” so that a “clear differentiation between one’s body and another’s becomes problematic” (Young qtd. in Perregaux 185). In Sister-Sister, Thuli becomes segregated from her own body precisely when she is raped by her uncle and then falls pregnant. Thuli is alienated from herself – she is no longer in complete self-possession, either of her physical or discursive body. It is surrendered to the public sphere. She is segregated from others at school and her choices become extremely limited. In the private sphere of the home, she can no longer connect with her sister – the rape and the pregnancy drive a wedge between them and interrupt the sacred space of sisterhood they had always enjoyed.

It is clear that the body is also a space within the city – a biopolitical space. Lefebvre states that the “whole of (social) space proceeds from the body” and that the body “prefigure[s] the layers of social space and their interconnections” (405). The link between bodies and space is also a central tenet of feminist geography. Elizabeth Grosz sees the city as a “simulacrum of the body” and the body as “citified” or “urbanized,” “distinctly metropolitan” (242). In Sister-Sister, Zadok uses visceral language of the body to describe the urban landscape, especially that of the road:

It hardly rains anymore. The cirrus clouds that wrinkle this faded sky are mean and meaningless. They leave the city to suffocate under the dust that creeps into everywhere, powdering our cheeks until we look like ghosts. With each passing season,

circling this road, I feel how it sucks at our juice. We are being slow-baked, hardened like tar. In summer the heat plucks our flesh, stealing sweat and blood and tears; in winter the cold freeze-dries our bones. When we pee, if we pee at all, it splashes up onto our shoes. The soil doesn’t want our water. There is nothing the earth wants from us, and we have nothing left to give. (32)

This fluidity between city and body, with the city sucking the girls’ juices until they have nothing left to give, emphasises the exploitative relationship of the urban and social (masculine) body to the private (female) body. Once the female body enters the public sphere in Sister- Sister, it must be manipulated and controlled. While Thuli’s pregnant body becomes, like Lilith’s, a palimpsest of social, political and religious constructions, Sindi is also subject to biopolitical forces. The Believers see her reproductive capacity as central to the revitalisation of both the human population and the purity of the city. In a theology that would not seem out of place in one of Octavia Butler’s novels, HIV-infected bodies (of women in particular) are linked to a narrative of social and urban decay in the city, requiring a new generation of women “pure in heart and vein” (172) to regenerate both human and metropolitan life.

This supports Barbara Hooper’s argument that the body functions as civic metaphor – the “body and the body politic, body and social body, body and city, body and citizen-body” (qtd. in Soja 114). Hooper believes the individual body is used as a sign of the health or disease of the social body, and that a public imaginary “obsessed with the fear of unruly and dangerous elements” is driven to control these bodies by constructing borders and policing them (114). She observes that the “global megacity with its restless (teeming, breeding) population and (in the US) the sensationalized, demonized bodies of black males and urban gangs . . . [represents] social disorder and pathology” (115). This construction is also

at work in Zoo City, with its growing population of aposymbiots who are explicitly positioned as criminals, and can also be read as commentary on the marginalisation of people with HIV.34

The animalled body corrodes the hierarchical distinctions between human and non-human, nature and culture, self and other, in an experiment with inter-species symbiosis that resonates with Lilith’s experiences with the Oankali discussed in Chapter 1. Like Butler, Beukes grants humans new abilities through relationships to non-humans. She terms the gifts the animals endow on their humans shavi – a word used by the indigenous Shona people in Zimbabwe to refer to deceased spirits who seek a living host. While a skilled diviner in Shona culture usually transposes the spirit to an animal host, any human who chooses to accept the spirit is blessed with special gifts, such as Zinzi’s ability to find lost objects. Zinzi’s animalling can be read as an indigenisation of the concept of the animal familiar, popularised in speculative fiction in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ series.

If, as Lefebvre argues, the body is a social space, then the aggregate bodies of aposymbiots must be segregated from non-aposymbiots to prevent the collapse of other boundaries that regulate the city. Many aposymbiots are corralled into Zoo City and marked as an almost subhuman class, and they become known as their animals – the Marabou, the Mongoose. Yet animalling also opens new possibilities for considering the erosion of anthropocentrism and granting animals expanded subjectivity – a concept that will be explored further in Chapter 3.35

34 This is also evident in Sister-Sister, with the stigma against HIV evolving into a suburban mantra: “Don’t buy a house in Vereeniging” (106, my emphasis).

35 This may have implications for thinking of geographies as a function of human epistemology. In a decolonised world that acknowledges the agency of all living things, new possibilities for imagining space emerge. Soja’s theory of Thirdspace as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life” (57) can, in the light of animalling, offer new kinds of spatial awareness that go beyond the trialectics of

By acknowledging the dependency of the city upon the body, and the public discourse that links the individual to a social body, Beukes and Zadok situate the black, female, animalled body itself as a Thirdspace of resistance and potential transformation. If such bodies are a kind of synecdoche for social or civic space, then Beukes and Zadok expose the ways in which bodies are both constructed by and transcend masculinist spatial practices.

The connection between the individual and the social body is reinforced through superstitions around the body in both novels. A continued belief in and fascination with the occult, particularly the piracy of body parts, reflects the syncretic spaces and practices that disturb the civil surfaces of a modern, progressive (and therefore masculinist) South Africa.

Occult and textual spaces

Beukes and Zadok acknowledge that occult beliefs – beliefs that evoke the spiritual or the magical – are not only integral to Johannesburg’s history and culture, but are also significant elements of the modern nation-state’s economy and inform everyday life. John Comaroff and Jean L. Comaroff believe occult economies are at the heart of South Africa’s postcolonial society. They define occult economies as “the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends” (279). While there has been some effort to corral indigenous healing practices to certain spaces within the city, such as the Mai Mai or Faraday healers’ markets, which have also become tourist attractions, they are not so easily suppressed, crossing boundaries between public and private space and the individual and social body.

Both Beukes and Zadok reflect the perseverance of the occult in postcolonial Johannesburg by focusing on superstitions about twins in

spatiality-historicality-sociality to explore multi-species ways of being together in space, potentially creating new kinds of spatial knowledge and awareness.

Zulu culture.36 In Zoo City, the disappearance of the twins Songweza and S’bu is revealed as the work of Odi Huron, their producer, who conducts a violent ritual in which he forces S’bu to kill Songweza and take on Odi’s own animal, an albino crocodile:

S’bu is rocking backwards and forwards, staring at his sister, his arms hugged around his body. His chest heaves with sobs. The darkness seethes and boils, like a slick of oil . . .

“Song?” S’bu says, his voice trembling.

The Crocodile suddenly bursts forward, its belly rasping over the concrete . . . S’bu screams as the reptile lunges for him. But it’s only moving to lean its massive head against his leg in something like affection. Horrified, he tries to shove it away. The same way I did with Sloth, until I realised he was the only thing between me and the rising dark. Of course, Sloth didn’t have my sibling’s blood on his teeth. (338-9)

This ritual takes place in another underground space – an underwater cave beneath Odi’s house where he keeps his animal familiar, the crocodile. As an article in The Daily Truth at the end of the novel states, “the man behind some of the finest talent in this country was a bigtime tsotsi, running drugs, killing homeless zoos for muti, feeding others to his Crocodile and cultivating talent only so he could slice them open” (344). Odi hides the bodies of his enemies and the artists whose deaths he can benefit from within this underwater cave. Thus, Odi’s reputation above is defined by what he hides below, the public image on the surface enabled through the dark secrets, including the sacrificed bodies, hidden in the subterranean spaces of his home. Odi therefore participates in an occult economy that, as Comaroff and Comaroff argue, helps people make sense

36 Traditionally, twins are a bad omen and it was once customary to kill one of the children at birth. They are believed to have special powers of communication with ancestors and each other.

of the “enchantments of modernity” in a city buffeted by the “contradictory effects of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism” (279) which bring the global and the local into jarring contact.

In Sister-Sister, the birth of Thuli and Sindi is seen as a bad omen by their grandmother, a Zulu woman. The novel opens with a dream she has before the twins are born (5-6). In the dream, she slips into the pool at the bottom of the KwaNogqaza Falls and is dragged down to the river bed by the Inkanyamba, a giant serpent, where she finds two stones. The Inkanyamba spits her out on the shore and she comes across two white chicks pecking maggots from the corpse of a gull. The water washes away, leaving only sand, and the world dies as the chicks grow fat.

This dream is the grandmother’s portent of the destruction the twins will bring to her community in Kwazulu-Natal. She tries to kill the newborn Sindi by stuffing her mouth with clods of earth. Though at first her neighbours shun her for her abhorrent act, they come to believe they must “return to the old ways” to “save themselves” (93) after severe drought strikes, destroying the cane fields and leading to the mass exodus of farmers and local services. Jabu, the twins’ uncle, explains to their mother that the only way to reverse this curse is to sleep with a virgin (93). He then rapes Thuli in an empty changing room when he takes the twins to New South Beach for a day. This act severs the special connection the twins have always shared, and eventually Sindi consults Gogo Nkosi, a sangoma,37 to find out how to steal her sister’s soul, having been led to believe she does not have one of her own by her grandmother and her schoolmate Nandi. Nandi is a devout Believer – a member of the new evangelical Christian order that advocates for the Ascension. The rape not only splinters the sisters – it is also the catalyst for the destruction of the family and, ultimately, leads to Thuli’s death and Sindi’s homelessness.

37 Traditional healer, particularly in Zulu culture

Yet the twins are also figures of hope. The newspaper headlines read ‘The Dawn of a Fresh New Day’ when they are born. Though the news story is about the transition from petrol to electric cars, the twins’ mother keeps a copy folded in her ID book and the twins think the headline refers to them until they are ten years old and learn the truth in a history class. Sindi says: “I thought we were the dawn they meant, and I told anyone who teased us that we were so special our birth made headlines” (12).

The multiple ways in which twins can be coded and read, and the shifting ways in which the twins view themselves throughout Sister-Sister, suggest that spiritual beliefs inform and exceed spatial boundaries. While the city is situated as a rational, progressive space in colonial discourse, against the more primitive and superstitious rural, the Zulu superstitions about twins follow Thuli and Sindi back from the remote kraal to the metropolis and, in concert with Christian Believer doctrine, lead Sindi to conduct a violent ritual in which she rips the soul from her sister and guides it into her own flesh. Meanwhile, the Believers of the One True Church establish ‘stations of purity’ to test their worshippers for HIV, broadcast their scriptures on radio and tv, and also proselytise across the city, seeking out the “pure in heart and vein, their blood untainted by sin” (172) to build a new, HIV-free population. Spiritual beliefs transcend the borders between the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern, the individual (body) and the social (body), and take root wherever they find the space. These occult spaces are often liminal, but are highly influential because they offer a different version of reality that denies the totalising efforts of the rational and progressive state.

The proliferation of the occult embodies the contradictions of modernity. In South Africa, occult economies that use magical means for material ends proliferate (Comaroff and Comaroff). Such practices are apparent not just in Africa or the global south but around the world, yet belief in the occult is often read in the West as a primitive and persistent quality of the

‘dark continent’. But occult economies may speak to widespread dissatisfaction with the inequality perpetrated by the modern nation-state. The very perseverance and proliferation of occult practices works against the taxonomic organisation of space through practices such as city planning, which seek to corral the occult outside the city or within certain areas such as markets, where they are acceptable as tourist attractions.

The occult can be read as oppositional because it critiques the spatial- historical-social effects of modernity, which repress that which is deemed traditional or irrational and relegate it to the rural or remote backwaters of the modern nation. However, magic, witchcraft and the supernatural offer ways for thinking through the hybrid manifestations of modernity in postcolonial spaces. This offers fertile terrain for imagining Thirdspaces in which the occult and the modern co-exist and inscribe Johannesburg with rich spaces capable of reflecting and driving African futures. Occult economies therefore represent a form of oppositional consciousness, with AfroSF addressing the empirical and the lived realities of ex-centric subjects across periods of uneven development.

Beukes and Zadok bring together formal and aesthetic elements of sf and fantasy in a hybrid literature that reflects the polymorphous modernities of the South African city, including the occult economies that pervade its many layers. While their novels are not magical realism, they achieve a similar sense of disorientation, not least because of the geographies they evoke. Brenda Cooper states that magic realism arose from the syncretisation of cultures that created a “social patchwork” (16) during and after colonisation in South America. Such writing can “seize reality” and “supplement or ‘improve’ mimetic discourse through a corrective gesture of dehierarchization and renewal” (Pordzik 130). This dynamic is clearly at work within Zoo City and Sister-Sister – both texts reject the limitations imposed by binaries that privilege the rational, the masculine and the modern in order to investigate Johannesburg’s multivalence. In doing so,

they create a textual space in which the material, the allegorical and the spiritual coincide, exposing a “deep and true reality” (Cooper 32). Yet they also reject the judgements implicit in the term ‘magic realism’ – that it is another realism, a less ‘true’ realism, a traditional or superstitious realism – by exposing the false dichotomisation of the rational and the superstitious in the lived spaces of Johannesburg.38

Andrew Thacker poses the idea of ‘textual space’ as a space that reconnects “the representational spaces in literary texts not only to the material spaces they depict, but also [to] reverse the movement, and understand how social spaces dialogically help fashion the literary forms of texts” (63). In their creation of new textual spaces, Beukes and Zadok intentionally reimagine sites such as Zoo City-as-Hillbrow in Beukes’s novel, and the Ring Road and the Golden Mile in Zadok’s. For Lefebvre, neither space, the “absolute lived” or the “abstract conceived,” exist separately, but are “two instances within one world, relative distinctions within a unity” (qtd. in Merrifield 134). In Sister-Sister, Zadok creates a new textual space that draws on multiple images of the road – a symbol of the modern nation- state.

Zadok creates a textual space in Sister-Sister by appropriating the myth of the King of the Road from Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991). Thuli’s spirit walks alongside her living sister, following the emergency lane of the Ring Road – the highway that circles the city and always brings them back to where they began. They “march past vacant lots bristling with scrubby grass, rusting cans and broken beer bottles,” only stopping to watch the evening rush hour (19). Zadok builds on the image of the road, constructed through generations of dream, myth and story, to reveal how lived space is constantly being reimagined. Just as Azaro’s Dad in The Famished Road incorporates the Yoruba myth of the hungry road into a story that serves the dual purpose of commenting on the promises of colonialism and

38 The problematic moniker of magic realism will be discussed further in relation to indigenous sf in Chapter 3.

discouraging his son from wandering too far, so too does Zadok elaborate on the existing narratives of the road to pose her own understanding of it. Zadok sees the road as a hegemonic space to which the girls, as homeless and pedestrian, can never truly belong in the way that those who drive it every day from their gated communities to work in the city do. While Azaro’s Dad’s statement that “a road that is open is never hungry” (Okri 571) reflects his optimism that food and other resources will be redistributed among the poor, for Thuli, the road is a circle, trapping her in the city and binding her to her sister and the stolen soul. The road is not an escape, but it is an end – the end of the ‘new dawn’ promised by the birth of the twins. Yet this end is not apocalyptic fulfilment. When Thuli’s spirit passes through the back doors of a roadside diner to find the hungry boss (who has just ordered the Soul Mates Classic LekkerBig) waiting for her, she is finally liberated from her sister. The road diverges and the sisters take different routes – one into a mythic afterlife, one into a different future with the Believers. In Sister-Sister, the textual space of the road comprises both imagined and material space, functioning as a Thirdspace that makes evident the mutual implication of the literary, social and material dimensions of space.

Not only are spaces such as Zadok’s Ring Road subject to constant reimagination, but so too are the myths, stories and dreams that shape understanding of them. Similarly, as spaces change – roads developed, high-rises constructed, walls built around white communities – so too are the stories about them affected. Paul Ricoeur states that myths evolve as “each generation receives or interprets them according to their needs, conventions, and ideological motivations” (Ricoeur qtd. in Kearney 40). New stories must develop to help make sense of each new iteration of space, shaping what ‘road,’ ‘city,’ and other urban ciphers mean.

Conclusion

In a study of postapartheid Sophiatown, Meg Samuelson demonstrates how urban modernity may be “razed” but not “erased” (70). Beukes and Zadok write Johannesburg as a palimpsest, enacting a trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality while also situating the city as primarily imaginary and constantly being rewritten to create Afrofuturist visions of the city.

Beukes and Zadok deterritorialise Johannesburg through their characters’ “nomadic transgression[s] of textual, spatial and ontological boundaries” (Mittag 251). This deterritorialisation reveals the nature of the city as a “kaleidoscopic plurality of different cities” (Murray 40). Space is imaginary, lived and material, and is informed by myriad beliefs and practices, including those of the occult.

Although some elements of their literary geographies could be plotted on a map of Johannesburg, the true space of the novels lives somewhere else, or ‘nowhere,’ as Ricoeur argues in his treatise on utopia and ideology. While the two are at times complicit (as at Constitution Hill with its image of reconciliation, fairness and equality), Ricoeur states that utopia functions most effectively when it speaks from a nowhere that is defined precisely through its exteriority to the ideological centre – “an empty place from which to look at ourselves” (15). This “leap outside,” or the “fantasy of an alternative society and its exteriorisation ‘nowhere,’” is “one of the most formidable contestations” of the present (16). The literary geography of sf, which is based on the principle of estrangement, therefore owes much to the original imaginary communities of utopia in that they both exist ‘nowhere’ – after all, utopia is ou-topia (no-place) as well as eu-topia (good place) – “precisely to the degree that they make somewhere possible” (Wegner xvi). Beukes’s and Zadok’s textual spaces pose new perspectives and possibilities – their cities, which exist nowhere, distance the present and enable movement beyond the actual.

Beukes and Zadok critique the hegemonic cartographies of the colonial enterprise and rewrite them with their own imaginary sf landscapes to create utopian Thirdspaces. Speculative geographies recognise that space is an imaginary project capable of dissolving colonial, hierarchical binaries, and pose new possibilities that thrive in unexpected spaces:

A stormwater drain, a highway, a roadside diner.

A story.

Coda

They found our bodies when they began to build the underground train stations and turned the old sewers into stormwater drains, but they didn't know what to make of us so they buried our bones near a memorial and muttered a few words of prayer over us. Then we were forgotten.

We haunted the city for a while, watching life go on. There was a new president and a new flag. There was so much construction happening that we couldn’t find any space of our own, so we took to sitting in front of the Pillars of the Constitution outside the museum, which were inscribed with words like democracy and reconciliation and diversity. When we got tired of that we’d go to the art gallery and look at the charcoal being drawn and erased and drawn again. We saw a man with water spilling from his pockets, a man in pinstripes dying in bed, a man’s eyes reflected in his rear-view mirror as he drove along a road at night. Line on line, smudge on smudge, the page stained, and in the stains were everything.

When it was time to leave the city, we gathered at the foot of the highest peak – the Carlton Centre. We took the stairs, walking past the shoppers and the people in the offices, looking in on the vacant spaces to make sure there were no squatters. The lights were very dim in the hallways so

when we came out on the roof we were dazzled by the sun and when we looked down everything was bathed in gold.

We stood there, at the Top of Africa, for a long time. It was then, standing on the edge of the tower, our bodies leaning into the wind, that we realised we couldn't leave. We’d built this place, and now we were written into it, like charcoal on a sheaf of paper that won’t disappear no matter how hard you rub at it.

So we stayed up there on the top of the tower. We just stood and looked. We could see for miles.

Past the old prison with its new high court.

Past the edges of the city with its long shadows.

Beyond the horizon.

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Chapter 3

Science Fiction as Indigenous Survivance: the Multi- Species Futures of Ambelin Kwaymullina, Ellen van Neerven and Alexis Wright

Prelude

She is different, this little girl. There is something unsettling in her gaze, as though she is staring right at you and through you at the same time. Is she the victim of some national tragedy, like a genocide or something? Some say she is the living flesh of a tree that was once the root of the world. Others say she was a Mute Swan who fell to earth and turned into a girl.

Whatever you believe, it’s clear she’s someone. Look at those eyes – so black they’re bottomless. That’s where the stories live. The ones she learned from the woman with the swan-bone flute and the crystal balls. You know the ones – the old tales of boys-cursed-swans and sisters working their fingers to the bone knitting nettle-sleeves. But she never says anything, unless it’s in the rustling of feathers or the quiet bleating to her red-beaked kin.

She is trapped in this country, bombarded by discursive missiles that fire off aphorisms about closing the gap and bringing them home that make no sense to swans. They shelter inside their tree house and watch the war through their windows until it’s at the door, knocking to be let in, and they flee to the basement down in the roots.

The last missile detonates and the dust mushrooms. Only the tree is left. She etches herself into the roots and the roots etch themselves into her skin, and they burrow deeper so they can’t be uprooted. She wants to make her own missiles and fire them back but what would you put inside them? Swan songs? Who would listen to that racket?

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At least the past is safe inside her now. She can sleep a long time down here, and dream this country from the roots up. She has a lot of stories to tell – the swan stories, of course, but also the ones from way back, the ones she can only tell in the ancient language of daylight and deepwater and dust. She’ll fight, for umpteen more decades if she has to, for what will always be here.

Introduction

While sf has long been recognised as a mode of postcolonial criticism, the voices of indigenous writers have largely been ignored within critical studies of the genre. With the major exceptions of Grace L. Dillon’s landmark anthology of indigenous sf, Walking the Clouds, and a forthcoming special issue of the journal Extrapolation (2016), comparatively little attention has been paid to how Aboriginal, First Nations and other native writers engage with speculative fiction and imagine the future. This chapter therefore explores how and why indigenous writing can be read as speculative when the genre has so often perpetuated colonial ideology and obliterated indigenous presence and sovereignty. Through analysis of Ambelin Kwaymullina’s ‘Tribe’ series (2012-2015), Ellen van Neerven’s story ‘Water’ in the collection Heat and Light (2014) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013),39 this chapter argues that indigenous writers who imagine different futures participate in what Anishinaabe author and critic Gerald Vizenor terms ‘survivance’ – an assertion of indigenous presence, agency and futurity. As survivance stories, all three texts are “renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (Vizenor “Aesthetics” 1) that proliferate in Western sf.

39 Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Kwaymullina is descended from the Palyku people of the Pilbara in north- western Australia. Van Neerven has both Mununjali and Dutch heritage; the Mununjali originate from the Gold Coast in north-east Australia.

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Indigenous survivance is imagined by all three writers as dependent upon inter-species entanglements and ontologies. By writing stories set in the future, Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright offer critical visions of alterity, reworking sf’s key tropes, such as alien contact and apocalypse, to seize the future as a site of struggle but also potential transformation. This chapter does not seek to stamp Western genre or epistemological paradigms upon indigenous writing and knowledge; instead, it suggests a way of reading the texts in relation to sf’s history and themes that gives precedence to the texts’ estranging features and foregrounds the significance of their authors’ future-thinking.

Indigenous writers extend the genre of sf and provide new ways of thinking through difference. The futures they imagine differ drastically from those in the Western sf canon. Indigenous writers and filmmakers critique the colonial past and present by appropriating sf techniques in diverse ways. For example, Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire (2011) and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2010) collapse science and technology with indigenous knowledges to create “indigenous scientific literacies” (Dillon), while Vizenor’s ‘Custer on the Slipstream’ and Helen Haig-Brown’s short film The Cave (2009) reimagine space-time configurations and experiment with “American Indian metaphysics” (Deloria). Addressing resource extraction as a form of neo-colonialism is central to Zainab Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares (1998), and Jeff Barnaby explores race and self-assimilation in his dystopian short film File Under Miscellaneous (2010). For Robert Sullivan, using Maori storytelling techniques in Star Waka (1999) offers new ways of thinking through colonisation and first contact.

While some indigenous authors are either self-described sf writers or are happy for their work to be classified as such, others do not take a clear position on the question of genre. In her introduction to Walking the Clouds, Dillon acknowledges that some of the writers excerpted in the

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anthology, such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie, have rarely been read as sf and are often categorised as magic realism instead. Yet she situates these writers alongside the likes of Stephen Graham Jones and Nalo Hopkinson, whose work is far more familiar to sf audiences. In bringing the work of apparently disparate authors into conversation, she emphasises how Silko, Alexie and other indigenous writers frequently orient their work towards the future while dealing with sf’s key themes, especially contact, aliens/alienation, apocalypse, dystopia and identity – the “sine quibis non of global Indigenous experience” (Dillon Walking 378).

While Kwaymullina and van Neerven have spoken of their work as sf, Wright has not explicitly framed The Swan Book in this way.40 Her previous work has at times been read as magic realism – a problematic interpretation. Such categorisation is an inherent judgement of the validity of indigenous belief in contrast to Western epistemologies, and perpetuates a hierarchical dualism that aligns the indigenous with the ‘magical’ or the impossible, and white reality with empirical ‘truth’. 41 As Stephen Slemon argues, “the established systems of generic classification are complicit with a centralizing impulse in imperial culture” (408). Alison Ravenscroft suggests that white readers cannot grasp the totality of indigenous texts – that the text they read is limited by their interpellation as white subjects and is, therefore, irreducibly different from the story being told. She speaks of a remainder – a surplus or excess – in indigenous writing that is unintelligible to white readers: “It is there, it exists, it has

40 Kwaymullina says she has “no objection to being described as a spec fic writer; it is a genre that I love and I set out to write within,” however, she also points out that the “very notion of what is speculative and what is not relies on assumptions about the real” that often emerge from Eurocentric worldviews (“Continuum” n.p.).

41 Wright states that magic realism is an “old fashioned” term in contemporary world literature, which “takes many shapes and forms and comes with many beliefs and ways of seeing the world” (“Interview” n.p.). She asserts that in Aboriginal belief systems there are “different realities, different ways of seeing things” (“Interview” n.p.) and it is the utopian possibility in the myriad differences of such worldviews, projected into future settings, that brings it into conversation with sf for the purposes of this chapter.

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effects, but for me as a white reader these effects might best be understood as ones that disturb my certainty in my own capacities to see” (56).

While this disruption in the familiarity of Western reading practices is, indeed, a powerful and important aspect of indigenous writing, to claim that indigenous work is something unknowable is ultimately unproductive. Ravenscroft interprets indigenous texts within a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ – a way of reading with the knowledge of one’s own unknowing. Yet to participate in such a reading practice also risks exoticisation – a further inscription of unassailable difference or alien-ness on the other. Instead of thinking about what cannot be understood, it is more useful to think about what can be imagined. This chapter’s approach to its indigenous author- subjects, therefore, acknowledges an uncertainty, not because of a chasm that lies between black and white experience or understanding, but precisely because of the indeterminacy of possibility itself within these speculative texts. The remainder or surplus Ravenscroft describes imbues the texts with their utopian function of anticipation. In exceeding the bounds of present understanding by imagining alternative futures, Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright bridge differences between black and white, human and non-human. They articulate difference not as something to be reinforced but as a critical manoeuvre against the present, through the utopian function of imagining what is possible. Cherokee writer Celu Amberstone states that indigenous fiction is “alive with new possibilities inspired by our cultural heritage, fiction that can offer new insights to our troubled world,” and is motivated by the “responsibility to offer humanity a new vision of the universe” (qtd. in Dillon Walking 63-4).

It therefore seems impossible to speak of The Swan Book – just as it is impossible to speak of the ‘Tribe’ series or ‘Water’ – without addressing its future-images. Such images work through estrangement – the very function of sf – to grasp new ways of seeing reality. In this sense, the project of reading indigenous work as sf differs from reading it as magic

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realism because it is an act of diversification rather than centralisation. Wright, like Kwaymullina and van Neerven, deploys the extrapolative features of the genre to reinforce the necessity of difference, rewriting the apocalyptic present and creating new futures based on indigenous practices and beliefs. She reimagines what is to consider what may be.42 Her narrativisation of indigenous dystopia situates the imagination as a key site of struggle, and the future as a battleground over the right to, and the necessity of, difference. The novel also incorporates many science fictional premises – it features an array of reimagined myths and fairy tales, experiments with time (both diegetically and as a fictive technique), plays with apocalyptic imagery, and investigates the boundaries between humans and non-humans. As such, the work is a speculative investigation into issues of power, sovereignty and identity.

Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright rewrite colonial history by imagining futures in which indigenous peoples are not rendered silent or invisible, either deliberately or through lack of representation. Indigenous sf is therefore not only an act of survivance, but also creates what Lavender terms ‘ethnoscapes’ – imagined worlds that provide a “symbolic transfer of meaning between racial/ethnic politics and the shifting world of the sf text” (“Ethnoscapes” 189). Indigenous ethnoscapes assert the presence and sovereignty of both indigenous and non-human subjects in the same way that Afrofuturism and AfroSF assert futurity for black writers and artists such as Butler. While Lavender focuses on race and ethnicity, indigenous writing also foregrounds the importance of non-human species and ecologies to unsettle sf protocols.

42 Indeed, Wright states that the question of the future – and especially how indigenous people are excluded from discussions of the future – provided inspiration for the book. She says that when she was living in central Australia and working with other indigenous communities, “we found it very frustrating that we couldn’t work on some ideas that we had for the future.” She says The Swan Book then “grew into a book about the future, about caring about the future, and that includes ideas about our relationships with each other in country, and ideas about global warming, and what the future might hold for our country and indeed the world” (Wright qtd. in Perpetual n.p.).

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While Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright create ethnoscapes of possibility that critique the genre’s tropes, they also mobilise sf’s critical and utopian potential. Indigenous sf offers glimpses of estranged worlds that redress the colonial fantasies rampant in Western sf to assert indigenous and non-human subjectivities. As Hopkinson states, although “one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives,” for many indigenous people, “that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange ship that appears from nowhere” (7). And yet sf offers indigenous writers great potential. As Kimberley Blaeser states, indigenous writing “often rewrites, writes over, writes through, writes differently, writes itself against the Western literary tradition” (qtd. in Kwaymullina ‘Continuum’ n.p.). As such, it “challenge[s] the reigning literary conventions and the enshrined styles of writing” (qtd. in Kwaymullina ‘Continuum’ n.p.). By situating their texts in relation to sf, either as an intended writing or reading practice, Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright emphasise how ethnoscapes can decolonise the future.

Ambelin Kwaymullina’s ‘Tribe’ series comprises three young adult novels: The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013) and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015). As the titles suggest, synergies between humans and non-humans are essential to Kwaymullina’s story of a tribe of teenagers living in a forest after an environmental cataclysm, known as the Reckoning, reshapes the world, bringing all the continents together into a single landmass. People live in harmony with the Balance, a universal equilibrium that sustains all life. Under the Citizenship Accord, all children are tested for special abilities, such as manipulating fire, water, plants, memories and dreams. Those who demonstrate inexplicable powers are placed in detention centres, which fall under the remit of a man named Neville Rose. The Tribe, led by Ashala Wolf, who is of Aboriginal heritage, are children and teenagers who have

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fled persecution and imprisonment for their special abilities. The ‘Tribe’ series evokes the science fictional world of X-Men as much as the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families as part of the Stolen Generations.43

In the story ‘Water’ in Heat and Light, van Neerven writes from the point- of-view of a young Aboriginal woman named Kaden whose family originates from the islands off southern Moreton Bay which are being transformed for the Australia2 project. Under a new program introduced by Prime Minister Tina Sparkle, Aboriginal people can apply to live in the self-governing Australia2, as long as they can prove they have been removed or disconnected from their country. During the re-formation of the existing twenty islands to create Australia2, a new species known as the ‘sandplants’ or ‘sandpeople’ are discovered, including the alluring Larapinta. Kaden discovers that the sandpeople are the ancestors of her mob – their “old people” or “spirits” (114) – and together they work to stop the Australia2 project, whose leaders are poisoning the sandpeople so they can force them to relocate. Again, inter-species relations are essential to the narrative, which re-works the science fictional tropes of colonisation and resource extraction, extending the critical legacy of sf such as Robert Silverberg’s Invaders from Earth (1956)44, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1976) and James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009), which re-tell stories of forced displacement of indigenous communities to extract natural resources.

43 In Western Australia, this was carried out under the supervision of the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A. O. Neville.

44 Invaders from Earth is set in 2044. Ted Kennedy works for an American public relations company, which is offered a contract by the Extraterrestrial Development and Exploration Corporation to promote the extraction of valuable minerals on Ganymede, which is opposed by the native people. Kennedy masterminds a publicity campaign to convince the world that there is a human colony on Ganymede, and that this colony is being attacked by the locals, known as Gannies, all in the hope that the United Nations will send armed forces to eliminate them. But when Kennedy visits Ganymede, he develops relationships with the Gannies and, upon returning to earth, attempts to halt the impending genocide his publicity campaign has sparked.

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Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book is set in 2088 after climate change has caused a global refugee crisis. An old woman, Bella Donna of the Champions, finds her way from Europe to Australia by following a Mute Swan across the seas. There, she discovers a mute girl, Oblivia, who has been hiding inside an ancient eucalyptus tree for a decade after being raped by a gang of youths high on petrol. Oblivia and her people live on a swamp under government intervention. Warren Finch, a member of the neighbouring Brolga nation and the soon-to-be first Aboriginal Prime Minister of Australia, seeks out Oblivia, who he claims as his promise-wife, and takes her across the country after blowing up the swamp. Oblivia escapes when the swans of the swamp come to find her in the city, and they travel back across the country to their ancestral lands. Throughout the novel, Oblivia’s connection to her country through her relationships with both swans and a sacred eucalyptus tree disrupts the anthropocentrism of sf and tackles the hyperseparation of species, attributing a shared, or at least mutual, respect of different beings’ cultures. At the same time, the novel is a direct critique of the 2007 Howard Government’s intervention in the Northern Territory that forced many indigenous people off their traditional lands.45

All three texts are written as acts of survivance. They offer ethnoscapes premised on inter-species understanding or even “multispecies aggregations” (Tsing qtd. in DeLoughrey 352). In doing so, they tackle the construction of the human in opposition to the non-human. As Val Plumwood argues, the gendered hierarchies of a ‘reason-centred culture’ or ‘hegemonic centrism’ only propagate anthropogenic climate change, mass extinction and widespread oppression of ex-centric subjects and other-than-human species. Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright address the interlinked modes of social, political, cultural and environmental

45 This also resonates with former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s support in 2015 of the Western Australian government’s plan to close down over 100 remote indigenous communities as they represent a ‘lifestyle choice’ that burdens tax payers and limits indigenous employment opportunities.

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colonialism that indigenous people continue to experience. In response, they assert complex inter- and multi-species relationships that are crucial to indigenous survivance and also address the global climate challenge in opposition to the catastrophic and anthropocentric visions of the majority of sf or cli-fi. While these texts are certainly not utopias, they offer utopian visions of possibility premised on what DeLoughrey terms “interspecies worldings” and also encourage new ways of reading and writing that acknowledges these possibilities.

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section argues that reading the ‘Tribe’ series, ‘Water’ and The Swan Book within the context of sf offers a way of thinking about indigenous futurity as a response to the colonial, apocalyptic visions of Australia and its first peoples that dominate literature and film. The second section discusses the multi-species ontologies that inform the texts, revealing how new practices of reading and writing other-than-human species are essential to indigenous survivance. The third section explores the protagonists’ connection to place – Ashala’s Firstwood, Kaden’s islands, and Oblivia’s swamp and ancestral tree – and finds within these homelands essential relationships that underpin indigenous survivance. Again, although sf is not the only way to read these texts, their speculative elements act as utopian interventions into the present and work to decolonise the future.

Rewriting indigenous apocalypse

The dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios of colonisation, environmental crisis, genocide, nuclear disaster and outback horror have all been popular in Australian sf (Weaver). These images are evident in, for example, John Marsden’s ‘Tomorrow’ series (1993-1999), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach

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(1957), which was adapted for film in 1959 and remade in 2000, and George Miller’s ‘Mad Max’ series (1979-2015).46

In the vast majority of these representations, indigenous people have been rendered invisible or portrayed as sub-human. Even before its colonisation, European cartographers and writers imagined Australia as terra nullius incognita – a place of openly available wealth, ripe for the taking.47 Early Australian literature enacted imperial mythologies, with many writers creating lost race narratives inspired by the sf of H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne.48 Blackford, Ikin and McMullen state that such works were attempts to “supply Australia with a ready-made national identity by creating a mythical past for the new continent” (19) that erased the living history of the indigenous population, mimicking colonial policy of the time. Early Australian sf texts featuring Aboriginal characters depicted indigenous people as primitive creatures to be eradicated, as in Erle Cox’s Out of the Silence (1925), or as remnants of a long-gone past, doomed to extinction or total assimilation, as in B. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947) (Attebery 390-1).

46 Examining this latest depiction of Australian apocalypse is revealing: there are no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander characters. The desert wasteland is dominated by white men (and one white woman) who possess a thanatic drive for ‘guzzoline’ and violence, while the redemptive characters are female and closely tied to a narrative of victimhood, sacrifice and rebirth through their roles as slave-wives, breeders and keepers of rare seeds.

47 These usually took the form of discovery or travel narratives in the tradition of More’s Utopia and include Gabriel de Foigny’s The Southern Land, Known (1676), which imagines a classless society of hyper-rational hermaphrodites, and Denis Verais’s The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi (1675), in which a shipwrecked captain discovers a society of camel-riding polygamists. Several well-known utopias were written in the nineteenth century, most notably socialist utopias such as William Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise (1892), and the utopian ideals of egalitarianism, mateship and loyalty were propagated as part of a national identity or mythology by writers such as Henry Lawson and Bernard O’Dowd (Blackford, Ikin and McMullen 19).

48 Blackford, Ikin and McMullen state that the unknown author of ‘Oo-a-deen; or, The Mysteries of the Interior Unveiled’ (1847) pioneered this kind of story telling in Australia, with the protagonist discovering a race called the Mahanacumans while hunting for gold (8). In Carlton Dawe’s The Golden Lake (1891), explorers search for a ‘Great White City’ in Western Australia, while Austyn Granville’s adventurers in The Fallen Race (1892) discovers a forest kingdom in the outback populated by human-animal hybrids that developed through crossbreeding between a lost Aboriginal tribe and kangaroos.

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It was not until fairly recently that Australian indigenous writing has been brought into conversation with sf, with some critics reading Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung (1990) and Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) as speculative or magic realist, while Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) deals directly with themes of race and apocalypse in a dystopian future. Such texts open “the possibility of science fictional dialogue between cultures” (Attebery 399). This possibility has been furthered in the last few years with Aboriginal writers such as Kwaymullina, van Neerven, Tristan Savage (Rift Breaker49) and Josh Bryer (Kindred50) producing sf. These new writers all imagine futures that are shaped by indigenous worldviews and contest the white, imperial visions of much sf and future-thinking in Australia, particularly in relation to the image of apocalypse.

Weaver notes that in many representations of Australian apocalypse there is the notion of a “dead heart” (135) at the centre of the country. She points to a long tradition of literature linking indigenous peoples to the outback and thus to a “convenient myth of disappearance” (135). For Attebery, invisibility or disappearance is a deliberate form of control (385) – the “fictional equivalent of the longstanding legal principle of terra nullius” (387). The disappearance of indigenous people from white visions of the future is an extension of this deliberate control in its assumption of indigenous non-existence through either genocide or extinction. Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright reject such futures by insisting on indigenous presence. They:

rewrite Australian history as apocalypse to represent the impact of white colonization on Indigenous people . . . to

49 A sf adventure story for young adults, Rift Breaker features spaceship engineer Milton Lance, a human raised by non-humans, who must work with an alien simian called Tazman and a woman named Luylla to save the world. The novel deals with themes of independence, identity and alienation.

50 Kindred is a major landmark in Australian and indigenous filmmaking. The first sf film with an exclusively indigenous cast, Kindred tells the story of an Aboriginal family kidnapped by aliens, and was screened at several international film festivals, receiving favourable reviews.

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invent a new world in which to challenge and change dominant cultural constructions for widely different agendas. The apocalyptic paradigm of revelation and disaster can work effectively to interrogate the history of colonization and relations between white and Indigenous Australians. (Weaver 136)

While it may be “almost commonplace to think that the Native Apocalypse . . . has already taken place” (Dillon Walking 8), indigenous sf reimagines apocalypse to assert the presence of indigenous people and constructs futures that subvert the colonial narratives of sf that so often render them archaic or invisible. Dillon therefore asserts that indigenous futurisms recover “ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Apocalypse world” (10). In Western discourse, apocalypse is associated with the biblical end-of-days, however, for indigenous writers, Lawrence Gross argues that apocalypse is a state of imbalance reinforced by “terminal creeds” (qtd. in Dillon Walking 9) – the very ideologies that perpetuate indigenous invisibility. Building on Gross’s argument, Dillon states that indigenous apocalyptic writing strives to show “the ruptures, the scars and the trauma in its effort ultimately to provide healing . . . This is the path to a sovereignty embedded in self-determination” (9). The centrality of sovereignty to indigenous futures is a key theme of all three novels discussed in this chapter.

In The Swan Book, Wright constructs the mind – and especially the imagination – as a space from which to critique and transform the future. It is the first step in destroying those “terminal creeds” that inscribe indigenous apocalypse into the popular imagination – a decolonisation of the mind and of the self. For Wright, sovereignty means “keeping the basic architecture of how you think . . . own[ing] the freedom of your mind, that unimpeded space to store hope and feed your ability to survive” (Wright qtd. in Gleeson-White n.p.). In the prelude to The Swan Book, this right to

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possession of one’s own mind – the right to difference – is framed as a contest. Oblivia’s mind is infected by a “cut snake virus” that “manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal” and fires them from a bazooka. The virus stands for the genocidal invective of the colonial state and its determination to eradicate difference, which is reinforced by policies that assimilate or destroy her people, from their use of language through to the right to live on their homelands. Oblivia wonders “what will be left standing in the end” (1) when the very sovereignty that underpins her self-determination is attacked. “This is where it begins as far as I am concerned,” Oblivia states. “This is the quest to regain sovereignty over my own brain” (4). As the only section of the novel told in the first-person, the prelude plays with narrative interiority and thereby foregrounds the degradation of indigenous sovereignty as an incurable pathology. Oblivia is an unreliable narrator who wonders which “splattering of truths” will survive in the colonised terrain of her mind, exposing the ways in which white discourse continuously denies indigenous sovereignty. And yet Oblivia has not yet surrendered. She links her self-determination both to the stories of swans and to the ongoing search for the “distant illusionary homelands” (4) that are all that remain of the swamp. In doing so, she situates the battle for sovereignty, the battle for the future, within the imagination.

Survivance necessitates sovereignty. By writing the struggles of past and present into the future, Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright all perform acts of “narrative resistance” (Vizenor Aesthetics 1). Their writing is imbued with not only the “sense of historical presence” that Vizenor ascribes to literary survivance, but most of all, a sense of possibility that moves beyond the present. The utopian assertion of continuity and authority deliberately addresses representations (or lack thereof) of indigenous people in visions of the future.

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Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright’s work is oppositional not only in its content, but also in its form. Vizenor states that the public has come to expect certain literary forms (mainly memoir or biography) from indigenous writers, and certain visual representations (dot paintings, for example) from indigenous artists. As Vizenor argues, indigenous literature is appreciated primarily for “its value as cultural representation” (“American” 46). He suggests that audiences are more interested in native stories for their “simulations of ‘authenticity’,” with all the stereotypes they expect of “Native tragedy, Native suffering and the complications of the loss of traditions and cultures,” than in “visionary, creative and innovative narratives” (46). Writing about the future is an act of resistance in itself, with authors casting off curatorial expectations. In defying these expectations, the authors discussed in this chapter assert their own sovereignty, and enact a politics (and poetics) of survivance that situates the future as an important and ongoing site of (de)colonisation. Survivance is also an act of anticipation. In seizing the future for its critical and transformative potential, these writers situate the battle for sovereignty as an act of imagination – a critical speculation that looks at the future implications of colonial ideology and offers visions of alterity.

But sovereignty is not solely a human privilege. Sovereignty, for Kwamullina, van Neerven and Wright, also belongs to many others who have been similarly colonised and silenced in text and film. These others – plants, animals and ecosystems – are central to imagining indigenous survivance. All three authors embrace inter-species relationships and frame the future as a space of cultural exchange between humans and non- humans.

Silence to sound: multi-species voices in indigenous sf

Indigenous people . . . know well the value of silence, and Indigenous silences run deep. Speaking no words at all

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remains an effective tool of resistance against new forms of colonialism . . . (Kwaymullina “Diverse” n.p.)

Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright transform silence from the imposition of subalternity to a postcolonial methodology that promotes indigenous survivance and embraces non-human ontologies. In doing so, they decentre Western epistemologies and draw attention to unexpected convergences and exchanges between human and non-human cultures. By imagining futures in which humans are embedded in multi-species networks, they participate in an ecopoetics that transforms the future from a space of “negative silencing” to one of “clamorous sound” (Jones “Breaking” 11).

The insistence of multi-species networks in constantly changing ecologies in indigenous sf also addresses the silencing of nature and the non-human in Western environmental sf or cli-fi.51 While cli-fi usually focuses on apocalyptic scenarios that posit nature as mindlessly hostile, or on the techno-scientific solutions that will allow humanity to overcome climate crisis, indigenous sf offers different perspectives. Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright situate multi-species ontologies as essential to imagining and responding to a changing climate. Addressing the hyperseparation of human and non-human species endemic to cli-fi is just one way in which indigenous sf explores some of these aspects of climate change. While for indigenous writers the close relationships between human and non-human are not necessarily science fictional, such approaches can nevertheless work through speculation or extrapolation to critique anthropocentrism in an era of planetary flux. Such narratives are necessary for a “restor(y)ing” of cli-fi by writers of diverse races and sexualities (Gaard 172).

51 Cli-fi was coined by Dan Bloom in 2007 and refers to fiction dealing with anthropogenic climate change, including, in Australia, George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987) and Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World (2009), which reinforce dystopian representations of Australian climate as inimical to human survival.

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Greta Gaard believes existing cli-fi narratives are too narrowly focused on apocalypse or on science as salvation – approaches that do not encourage systemic changes based on eco-justice (172). Given that indigenous communities, and women in particular, are among those most affected by climate change, postcolonial women’s perspectives are desperately needed in sf and cli-fi to move beyond the catastrophism and the techno-science of the Western imaginary. Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra suggest that genre fiction such as sf provides critical insight into the climate crisis because “divergences from the norm are more apparent” than in literary fiction (197). Sf can “explore the complex scientific, political, and cultural aspects of climate change” (197) in ways that other literatures cannot.

In a world in which language is an ideological weapon, Wright instructs the reader in the importance of listening within the text, especially to non- human forms of expression.52 In The Swan Book, Oblivia, as a mute girl, speaks to the ways in which both indigenous and non-human voices have been silenced, for example, through the repression and extinction of indigenous languages. However, it is important to note that in The Swan Book, Oblivia chooses to remain silent as she believes no one will listen to her. Wright draws attention not only to how and why silence can be mobilised as a form of resistance, but also to myriad other forms of communication that exist. These forms saturate The Swan Book – for example, swans “sing ceremonies in flight” that instruct Oblivia in “endurance and perseverance” (240), owls can be heard murmuring in ancient cypress trees on a freezing night (142), and mynah birds “[swear] at the grass in throwback words of the traditional language of the country . . . no longer spoken by any living human being on the Earth” (329).

Wright and Kwaymullina situate listening as essential to the decolonisation of the future. They draw attention to the voices of

52 Listening also suggests a way of a reading an indigenous text without imposing Western epistemologies or segregating the white reader from the text through the poetics of uncertainty suggested by Ravenscroft.

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indigenous and non-human subjects who transmute colonial silence and assert their sovereignty and futurity. Deborah Bird Rose states that certain forms of expression – especially speaking and writing – are seen as the primary forms of active communication, and that listening is not regarded as equally important. This disregard for listening, she argues, is “part of the structure of hyperseparated dualisms: to speak is the human prerogative (because we have language), it is the active mode of being; listening (or being spoken to) is the passive or recipient position” (“Plumwood” 102). As part of these dualisms, women, indigenous people and animals are rendered “mindless and voiceless” (Belenky et. al. 15). Sandra Styres, on the other hand, insists that silence can also serve as “anguish, anger, aggression, resentment, resistance and/or stoicism through the void or space it creates” (90).

Both Wright and Kwaymullina move beyond the construction of silence as the antithesis of speech and investigate alternative forms of communication. Wright explores these alternatives through Oblivia’s connection to the swans, who instruct her in the laws of country, while in Kwaymullina’s ‘Tribe’ series, some humans can communicate through dreams and memories without need for speech. In addition, the saurs can ‘mindspeak,’ and Ashala forges a tacit connection with the Firstwood through the exchange of sensation and imagery – both forms of communication are similar to telepathy. The human and animal silences in The Swan Book and the ‘Tribe’ series are ‘decolonised silences,’ that is, silences that create space for “healing, resistance, reclamation, deconstruction, empowerment” (Styres 96). Decolonised silence recognises that indigenous and non-human communication does not always privilege the written or the spoken word, and that ideas and stories can be communicated through many other means that assert multi-species survivance and sovereignty.

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In The Swan Book, Wright grants black swans their own voice, their own sovereignty, and links this closely to Oblivia’s struggle for sovereignty over her mind. When the swans arrive, refugee-like, in the swamp – first in the form of Bella Donna’s swan myths, and later in a great flock – they sing themselves into the country. Oblivia instinctively feels a strong connection with the swans. When a single feather drifts down and touches her head, she instantly turns a “darker shade of red-brown” (14) and intuits that the swan is not an “ordinary swan” who has been displaced but has come to the swamp “searching for its soul in her” (15). The swamp’s elders claim the swans are returning to their traditional lands, “following stories for country that have always been known to them. Swans had Law too” (67). Oblivia feeds the swans, plays with the cygnets, and believes that, through the swans, she “might learn how to escape as freely as they had been able to take flight” (69). At the same time, Bella Donna fills Oblivia’s head with swan stories, so that Oblivia seeks answers to “universal questions about how people should live . . . by tossing herself into the old woman’s madness of singing to swans” (72). Oblivia’s understanding of the swans’ culture shapes her own identity, her own sense of purpose.

When the swamp is destroyed by Warren Finch and Oblivia is taken away, the swans follow her across the desert so they can bring her back home. In her dreams, Oblivia sees them “forcing their spirits through films of salt to reach her during the night” (191). When they arrive in the city, she “feels the presence of their bodies” (243) and old poetry Bella Donna once told her runs through her mind: “The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven. That image can bring wildness, bring a range to end all things, to end . . .” (266). Seized by this terminal velocity, Oblivia escapes Warren after (possibly) killing him, and journeys home with the swans as her guide. It is the swans who demonstrate a deep knowledge of country, guiding Oblivia safely through unknown territory and conducting their own rituals on the way, such as rain dances in the desert.

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Wright recognises that animals have their own cultures, which are interlinked with other species’, including human. Deborah Bird-Rose points out that in indigenous cultures, not only are animals ‘persons,’ they are also ‘kin,’ generating a rich and complex system of responsibility and exchange (“Death” 137). Acts such as the swans’ rain dance are evidence of a “world of multiple purposes . . . a multicultural world from inside the earth right on through the ephemeral life inhabiting water, air and land” (Rose ‘Death’ 139). Plumwood sees animism as part of an “enriching, intentionalising and animating project” (“Nature” n.p.) that destabilises colonial ethnocentrism. By recognising the creativity and intelligence of the non-human (a category indigenous subjects have often been corralled within), Wright disrupts the hyperseparation of species and imagines non- anthropocentric futures as a response to apocalyptic sf and cli-fi.

Some of the most intriguing characters in the ‘Tribe’ series are non- humans, and especially intriguing are the saurs – enormous black reptiles with powerful limbs, jaws and tails who live on the grasslands beyond the Firstwood. The saurs practise their own culture, uphold their own laws and protect their sovereignty fiercely. They will not tolerate strangers on their lands but they also have a Pact with the Tribe, including the stipulation that no Tribe member will eat meat. Each of the saurs has a clearly defined personality, reflected in their names, which are liable to change over time with those personalities. These include Hatches-with-Stars, Wanders-too- Far, Keeps-the-Memories and Tramples-my-Enemies. Only the Tribe knows of the existence of the saurs, and few know that they can mindspeak. When Wanders-too-Far first meets Ashala and Georgie, who, unknowingly, are trespassing on saur lands on their way to the Firstwood, he is cautious and considers killing them: “Our songs say humans fear difference, and when they are afraid, they will find a way to destroy what they fear. Unless they do not know it is there” (Interrogation 189). Ashala and Georgie want to live in the forest, but Wanders-too-Far warns them that the forest, which “grew from seeds that survived the great chaos,”

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carries the memories of the “lost forests of the old world” and does not forget what humans did there (189). Ultimately, Wanders-too-Far decides to allow the Firstwood to judge Ashala and Georgie for itself:

You will make your plea to the forest. Perhaps the trees will let you stay. But be warned, whatever bargain you make with them, the saurs will ensure you keep it. And if the forest decides you must go, then we will finish you. (190-1)

While humans have the Accords, including the Citizenship Accord, the Benign Technology Accord and the Necessities-of-Life Accord, which work to uphold the Balance, saurs have an intuitive understanding of the interconnectedness and animacy of all things, including the forest, and follow their own laws to protect it.

Both Wright and Kwaymullina are interested in multi-species subjectivities. Such perspectives resonate strongly with recent work in the environmental humanities on multi-species ethnography, which explores the ways in which living organisms both shape and are shaped by an array of forces – political, economic and cultural (Kirksey and Helmreich n.p.). Kirksey and Helmreich align multi-species ethnography with Eduardo Kahn’s ‘anthropology of life’ – “an anthropology that is not just confined to the human but is concerned with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of living selves” (Kohn qtd. in Kirksey and Helmreich n.p.). But even more than a multi-species ethnography, the relationships both Kwaymullina and Wright draw, between saurs and humans, and between swans and humans, resonate with the ‘inter-species worldings’ suggested by Elizabeth DeLoughrey. The complex inter-species relationships between humans and non-humans that are essential to indigenous ways of life offer radical ways of thinking about the future that critique hyperseparation in sf and Western discourse, thereby addressing one of the underlying causes of anthropocentric climate crisis.

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This also raises important questions about the human. Braidotti suggests that post-anthropocentrism not only displaces species hierarchies but, significantly for sf, reveals that animals are not “signifying systems” that prop up “humans’ self-projections” (70). She argues that animals need to be theorised in a “neo-literal mode” or a “zoontology” (70). For her, “the point” of posthuman relations is to see the inter-relation of human and animal as “constitutive of the identity of each” (79). Bringing Western and indigenous ways of thinking about the non-human into conversation as an act of speculation, of utopian possibility, is one way of intervening in anthropocentric futures. DeLoughrey argues that “indigenous and multi- species ontologies offer another mode of thinking at planetary scales” and draws on the work of Vandana Shiva to suggest that humans must situate themselves with compassion and solidarity among other species rather than within global systems of capital that, by nature, are disconnected, disembodied and disempowering (363). As Anna Tsing states, “we become who we are through multispecies aggregations” (qtd. in DeLoughrey 352). For Kwaymullina and Wright, it is only through mutual becomings, based on non-hierarchical species interactions, that human survival is possible. The future does not make sense without acknowledging that “becoming is always becoming with” (Haraway Species 244), and this understanding, for both authors, opens up pathways of resistance against the assimilationist forces that seek to subject all life to a single way of being. In this sense, their writing is posthuman and post-anthropocentric because it recognises the co-constitution of the human with the non-human in living networks.

The transformational impetus of Kwaymullina’s novels is underscored when Jaz, one of the youngest members of the Tribe, becomes a saur after breaking the Pact by eating a rabbit he finds dead on the plains. Although the Pact dictates that Jaz must be sacrificed to the saurs in return, the saurs instead decide that he is more saur than human. They hold a ceremony in which they sing ceremonial songs from the old world to

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transform Jaz from human to saur. His physical appearance changes, darkening to match the saurs’ scales. There is a new “reptilian elegance to his movements” (214) and he learns to mindspeak. He explains to Ashala that he is “not Tribe anymore” (215) and that his new name is Blazes-with- Fire (216).

The Tribe’s alliance with the saurs strengthens throughout the series, and they become important allies to Ashala, although they are never manipulated as resources. The two species’ strategies align and their combined abilities, motivated by the drive to protect their sovereignty and the ecosystems in which they belong, prevail against the forces that are determined to eradicate them. Throughout the war between the Tribe and Rose and his allies, Jaz remains an important figure, both as a tool of communication between humans and saurs, and as a symbolic representative of the cultural ties between human and non-human. Although he is no longer Tribe, he is, at the same time, always Tribe, because for Ashala and her friends, the Tribe is premised on belonging, and all species belong in the web of life – a sharp contrast to the government’s view that those with abilities are not part of the Balance. In an article on indigenous law, Kwaymullina cites her mother, the renowned Aboriginal writer and artist Sally Morgan, to describe how conceiving of the self as part of a greater Balance is the first step towards real change. This belief is evident in the ‘Tribe’ series, and serves as a utopian movement towards different futures based on multi-species belonging:

If we, as human beings, continue to cut ourselves away from the web of life, then we embrace a story that, like terra nullius, can have only one ending – death. Far better, then, to embrace a story which not only honours life, but returns it a thousandfold to all those who will come after us. (“Introduction” 22)

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Although they situate humans in interdependent networks with other species, both Kwaymullina and Wright are careful to avoid speaking for animals. In The Swan Book, the plethora of swan stories seems to indicate that there is something about the swan that elides human understanding or representation. Swan stories litter the novel: Banjo Paterson’s black swan crying to its mate in flight; the wintering oo-hachuko of Japan’s Akkesi-Ko sleeping on Lake Kussharo, the stars of Cygnus pointing north along the Milky Way – all these and more find their way into The Swan Book. Oblivia herself lives on Swan Lake, the ironic name for the swamp after the black swans come to stay. Yet the black swans bring their own distinct culture free of the predominantly Eurocentric depictions of them, (re)inscribing themselves into the country and establishing themselves as Oblivia’s kin. While the swans cannot speak as Kwaymullina’s saurs do, they are nevertheless not silent, and express themselves in behaviours such as flight, song and dance.

In weaving together swan stories, Wright frees the animals from the silence of metonym – it seems the swans are not swans, but rather represent a swan-ness humans have created and to which they can relate. Wright’s writing does not seek to create a portrait of a swan; instead, it instils relationality between species, with the black swans of the swamp reconstructing Oblivia’s memory and sovereignty through their own cultural practices. Wright recognises that animals are “primarily symbolic” in most representations – in fables, in cartoons, even in natural history and science (Huggan and Tiffin 129). Animals are given “exclusively human significance” through metaphoric associations that always position the (masculine, speaking) human as the superior referent in the human- animal binary (129). The Swan Book is, therefore, an intervention into the human language used to describe and silence the swan, replacing it with suggestions of swans’ own cultures, languages and histories. This intervention reworks the hyperseparation of species in sf and reinforces how such segregations divorce humans from the connective tissue of the

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world body. Both Wright and Kwaymullina bring animals into their work to sketch out the limitations of trans-species knowing but also, at the same time, to acknowledge inter-species dependencies.

The idea of multi-species identities is something that many sf writers, including Butler and Beukes, have imagined. Yet Wright and Kwaymullina take a drastically different approach to that of Beukes, for example. Animal familiars in Zoo City are not represented as having cultures of their own. They provide new talents for their aposymbiot and become an integral part of that person’s identity and personality. The animal is an extension of the unconscious in a Jungian tradition that leads Beukes to link her animals to Philip Pullman’s daemons53 in the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. Although Kwaymullina and Wright see strong connections between humans and animals, they do not create a metaphysical bond between them. This is a significant manoeuvre for indigenous writers, whose peoples have so often been grouped with animals (along with slaves and women) in schemata such as the Great Chain of Being, and who continue to be represented as animalistic or primitive in literature and film, naturalising their oppression and their othering.

While animals and other non-humans in sf often metaphorise race relations, many sf writers are interested in animals as something more than ciphers for human interactions and hierarchies. Vint acknowledges that while it may seem counterintuitive to look to sf for depictions of animals when animals have “steadily disappeared from modernity” (Animal 1), she argues that sf and animal studies investigate questions about the construction of the human and of alterity. For Vint, both sf and animal studies are concerned with theorising and imagining beings whose “embodied, communicative, emotional and culture life – perhaps even physical environment – is radically different from our own” (1). Such

53 Daemons in ‘His Dark Materials’ series are the animal manifestations of a character’s inner self. In that sense, they are not really animals at all, but projections of the human self in symbolic form as a way of manifesting primal aspects of human consciousness.

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concerns resonate strongly with the speculative investigations of Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright. Vint identifies “alterity, subjectivity and the limits of the human” (2) as the shared terrain of both sf and animal studies, and it seems that thinking through the ways in which indigenous writers might overlap into this terrain offers productive ways of thinking through inter-species relations.54

In indigenous sf, this relationality also extends beyond animals. Kim Tallbear states that indigenous thinkers broaden the definition of ‘life’ – to go beyond life as what is “more or less organismically defined” – and introduce “spiritual powers” into definitions of life, including “the elements and majestic forces in nature, Lightning, Wind, Water, Fire, and Frost” (Deloria qtd. in Tallbear n.p.). For Kwaymullina, the diversity of these powers and connections is rooted in the concept of Country:

[Country] is an ever moving, ever shifting, ever changing network of relationships; a pattern comprised of other patterns in which everything is interrelated and interdependent. Country is both alive and conscious and the source of all consciousness. It is the web of relationships that is the world. (“Continuum” n.p.)

Country, too, has a voice. All life is rooted in country. For Ashala and her Tribe, Oblivia and the swans, and Kaden and the plantpeople, survivance is rooted in place. While sf and cli-fi have often represented the environment (‘Mother Nature’) as inimical to humans – something to be overcome by masculinist, rationalist techno-science – Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright tie ecological crisis to the loss of indigenous and non-

54 Karel Capek’s War With the Newts (1936), Frank Schatzing’s The Swarm (2004), Laline Paull’s The Bees (2014) and Robert Repino’s Mort(e) (2015) all contain speculative elements and deal with issues or race, autonomy and subjectivity. They are examples of how science fictional representations of animals rewrite what Vint calls the “fiction of empire” (133) and address colonial, capitalist and patriarchal ideologies that alienate humans from animals, and render them silent and invisible.

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human survivance, positing Country as culture that underpins the interconnectedness of all species.

Utopian homelands

With interconnected relationships to land, identity is island, river, mangroves, forest and desert; identity is magpie geese, emu and spinifex. (van Neerven “Country” n.p.)

In the ‘Tribe’ series, ‘Water’ and The Swan Book, nature is not silent, but, like animals, finds other forms of expression. These authors’ responses see the threat to indigenous sovereignty as inextricably linked to the destruction of the natural environments that are their traditional lands: the Firstwood, the swamp and the islands.

For Oblivia and the swans, survival is rooted in the traditional homeland of the swamp. The swamp, like Oblivia and the swans, is not silent – it is a cacophonous place full of stories for those willing to listen:

The swamp’s natural sounds of protest were often mixed with lamenting ceremonies. Haunting chants rose and fell on the water like a beating drum, and sounds of clap sticks oriented thoughts, while the droning didgeridoos blended all sounds into the surreal experience of a background listening, which had become normal listening. Listen! That’s what music sounds like! The woman once explained to the girl that the music of epic stories normally sounded like this. This is the world itself, disassembling its thoughts. (54)

The swamp is not simply a landscape – it is an ancestral homeland that sustains Oblivia and her people’s sovereignty and ensures their survivance. Even with their traditional lands radically transformed by climate change and the government’s intervention, the swamp people espouse a “return to

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a homeland which haunts their memories” and it is “this haunting, this longing, this loss” (Nyoongah 26) that serves as a form of survivance premised on an inalienable connection to country. Even when the physical signifiers of that country no longer exist after Warren Finch annihilates the swamp, Oblivia’s connections to country remain intact through her relationships to the swans and her connection to the ancestral eucalyptus tree.

The Firstwood is also an active force within the ‘Tribe’ series. Ashala in particular has a special connection with the tuart trees, which grow from seeds that survived the Reckoning and carry the memories of their ancestors in the old world. Ashala makes the Pact with the Firstwood – a pact to live in harmony with it, to protect it from other humans – and she and the Firstwood share their sense of grief. For Ashala, her grief stems from a sense of guilt over the death of her sister, Cassie, and her parents’ betrayal – they were the ones who informed the government of her sister’s abilities. Similarly, the forest harbours anger and suffering, based on the destruction of trees by humans prior to the Reckoning.

I let my tears dribble onto the bark, and a new image came into my head, one of bare, broken earth. That picture seemed to blur into the scorched ground where Cassie had died, and all I could see or feel was an aching nothingness. For a long moment, me and the Firstwood were sad together. Then something started growing in the emptiness. Tiny green sprouts shot up out of the earth. The sprouts became saplings and the saplings mighty trees, and around them, other things grew too. Small streams of water swelled into rivers and filled hollows in the earth to make pools. Peppermints, flowers and shrubs sprung up beneath the shelter of the tuarts. Birds nested, wolves denned and saurs hatched from their eggs. And beneath and within and between it all was a shining

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shape that was somehow the beginning and the end of everything. (Interrogation 197)

Ashala tells new Tribe members that the Firstwood is the place where life begins again. In listening to the forest, Ashala fully grasps how all things are connected in the Balance, and it is only then that she is able to accept herself and build a new life with her Tribe. It is also through her connection with the Firstwood that she is able to contact her ancestors. At the centre of the forest is a lake where a great spirit lives, the Rainbow Serpent, who takes the role of ‘Grandfather’ in Kwaymullina’s novels – the creator of ‘her people’ in the old world. Grandfather is the one who sings the Firstwood into existence following the Reckoning and continues to nurture the land and uphold the Balance in a continuous act of creation. For Kwaymullina, as for Ashala, country, ancestor and creation are intertwined, and sustain all species.

Kaden’s desire to avoid a devastating loss similar to that suffered by the tuarts and the swamp people is what motivates her to work with Larapinta and her family to stop the Australia2 project. As Kaden spends more time with Larapinta among the islands, she begins to see herself, her species, in a different light: as a being in relation to other non-human beings. When Kaden takes on the role of Cultural Liaison Officer for the government – in which she is supposed to convince the sandpeople to relocate – she has an ambiguous connection to her ancestral country of the islands. When Larapinta asks if she is upset about the mining of the sea to re-form the islands as Australia2, Kaden says, “Oh, I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve never been there. How can you have an attachment to a place you’ve never been?” (79) But her position changes radically by the time she discovers that the formula she has been delivering to the plantpeople – ostensibly to keep “soapberry bugs away” (90) – is in fact laced with chlorine to make them more compliant. While Milligan, the head of the Australia2 project, sees the plantpeople as weeds, Kaden believes their treatment is “like

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social Darwinism, like the twisted justifications of treating black people worse because of their race and skin colour” (94). This critical position is deepened by a connection to country that Larapinta awakens. Larapinta explains to Kaden that “humans never see what’s coming.” She says:

Everything is seasonal, cyclical, dependent on environment and weather conditions. Would I love you in the winter, when my toes are frost? Would I love you in the summer, when the wind comes tumbling on me? (96)

This conversation prompts Kaden to question what it means to be human, in light of her freshly disturbed understanding of what it is to be a plant. Kaden studies Larapinta, noting her “wild frond-like hair . . . bleached pale pink in parts,” her face “like me and you” with “space for two small eyes and a hint of a mouth,” and her body, “shaped like a post, covered in prickles except for the hands,” and wonders if she is “blind not to notice much difference” (78). In pondering what a plant is – “a living organism” that provides “most of the world’s molecular energy” and is the “basis of the world’s ecologies” (96) – van Neerven reveals how all life is inextricably linked to plant life, together with the insufficiency of describing plants solely in relation to their biological properties and functions.

The increasingly intimate and ultimately sexual relations between Larapinta and Kaden further awaken Kaden’s connection to country. She realises her ancestors are both plants and people, both of the past and the present – her ancestors are the islands. Eventually, she understands that these connections inform her own identity and her people’s culture. They are connections that cannot be severed.

Rose describes country as culture: “sentient, communicative, relational and inter-active” (“Plumwood” 100). Country is a way of existing – the “context of life and the emergent results of life being lived” that “flourishes

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through looped and tangled relationships” (100). With country, there is no distinction between nature and culture, no hyperseparation of human and non-human – country is an “entangled matrix of interspecies situatedness” (100). For Oblivia’s community, the swamp is so central to their identity that they cannot survive outside it and refuse to leave despite the intervention: “Then, without country, imagine that? Imagining! Can’t imagine. For country never leaves its people” (26).

Country is always with Oblivia because she has a sacred connection to the ancient eucalyptus tree that the swamp elders say contains all the stories of the swamp – “doctrines of Law left by the spiritual ancestors” (79). The tree is “like all of the holiest places of the world rolled into one” and their “oldest living relative” (79). The swamp elders believe the tree calls to Oblivia when the gang of youths break its laws and rapes her, and that it is only natural for her to seek protection within it. While sleeping within the tree, she channels the stories and law of the country, inscribing them into the tree and into her own flesh:

Locked in the world of sleep, only the little girl’s fingers were constantly moving, in slow swirls like music. She was writing stanzas in ancient symbols wherever she could touch – on the palms of her hands, and all over the tree root’s dust-covered surfaces. Whatever she was writing, dredged from the soup of primordial memory in these ancient lands, it was either the oldest language coming to birth again instinctively, or . . . words that resembled the twittering of bird song speaking about the daylight. . . . Her fingers traced the movements of the ghost language to write about the dead trees scattered through the swamp, where dikili ghost gums old as the hills once grew next to a deepwater lake fed by an old spring-spirit relative, until they had all slowly died. (7-8)

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Finch sees this tree as “a nexus of dangerous beliefs” that must be eradicated in order to “close the gap between Aboriginal people and white people” (79). Although Finch bombs the swamp and destroys its physical presence, country cannot be eradicated so easily, and a spectral homeland persists in Oblivia’s consciousness. In the act of writing on her palms and on the tree roots, Oblivia creates an embodied connection to the tree that remains even when the tree is destroyed; or, perhaps more accurately, a connection to the space the tree represents as a repository of her people’s dreaming and law. This space becomes a refuge to which she escapes when she feels threatened; for example, when lying in the desert wondering whether to smash Finch’s skull in with a rock, she “escapes with a flood of thoughts running back along the song-lines to the swamp, and the language inside her goes bolting down the tree with all the swans in the swamp following her” (172). Having always felt a “sense of belonging” in the “tinder-dry nimbus” of the tree (5), Oblivia continues to anchor herself to that sense of belonging and the spectral homeland it represents. When the swans find Oblivia in the city, they revive that connection between Oblivia and her home, “sprinkling dust down like magic so that her mind ran straight back to the swamp’s ancient eucalypt” (248).

Oblivia’s homeland persists despite the destruction of the swamp and the tree, because the stories and law persist inside Oblivia, inscribed with and upon her own hands. Things linger – “spectres, ghosts and ‘things’ that go bump in the night” (26). The spectral homeland exists in Oblivia’s imagination as a space of oneiric consciousness that enables resistance and serves as a form of anticipation rather than just memory. Oblivia’s struggle for sovereignty is framed as an ongoing journey towards a homeland from which she hopes to “lure the virus hidden somewhere in its own crowded globe to open the door” (4). She journeys towards ‘home’ or Heimat in the sense intended by Bloch – an “anticipated state of reconciliation with conditions of possibility that do not as yet exist” (Daniel 59).

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Heimat, as the ultimate utopian horizon, is a place of fulfilment and belonging. It is, Bloch states, “a place and a state in which no one has yet been. And the name of this something is home” (Principle 3 1376). This sense of fulfilment and belonging must, however, work through memory, through anagnorisis or recognition, to prove itself as genuine. Vincent Geoghegan states that in this conception, the future “is not a return to the past but draws sustenance from this past,” to the extent that memory provides the means to ground the future in the past (51). The concept of Heimat also embodies the tension between ideology and utopia. In German, Heimat is a complex term. Jamie Owen Daniel explains that while it means ‘home’ or ‘homeland,’ it also connotes an essential Germanic identity and culture rooted in a mythic past used to prop up nationalism. Bloch uses Heimat to move beyond a “nostalgic reconciliation” with this imagined past to denote the anticipated state of reconciliation that forms a “utopian antithesis” to fixed ideologies (Daniel 59).

The image of Heimat as a space free of alienation, a space to which all belong, is also present in the ‘Tribe’ series. In The Foretelling of Georgie Spider, Ashala weaves a dream that suggests a homeland for all – human and non-human. She finds the tuart she wept with when she first came to the forest and, from there, envisions “a world of connections” (418) for humans and for “trees and saurs and rivers and flowers and rocks . . . wolves and yellowcrests and spiders and hawks and crows, and for all life everywhere. All of us or none of us. All life matters or none does” (418). The dream flows from Ashala and connects with all humans, strengthened by the spirits of ancestors such as Grandfather, until all share the dream and must choose whether to believe in this vision or reject its possibilities. In ‘Water,’ the government’s mining activities are premised on the image of a false indigenous utopia that only deepens segregation. This geological disturbance awakens the ancestral plantpeople, who are prepared to sacrifice themselves so Kaden and her family can secure the future – a

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future to which they will always be connected through the persistence of the islands and the survivance of their descendants. All three authors’ visions of homelands are, therefore, premised on the very sovereignty that is threatened by the destruction of the sacred places that define Ashala, Oblivia and Kaden. And yet these homelands are not just situated in the future, but emerge from the past and work through anticipation in the present, suggesting that Heimat exists in all times through its imaginative function.

Oblivia in particular occupies an ambiguous position in time: she sleeps within the tree for ten years, for example, and by the end of the novel haunts the swamp, watching past generations live and die. This temporality is embedded in country and resonates with the Maori concept of ‘spiral time’ that connects the “time sequence of geology, life cycles, cosmology and ecology” (Wood 115). Time repeats but is also flexible. Oblivia’s drawing of swirls upon the trees and her palms seems to be a corporeal enactment of a temporal relationship to country, coalescing in reoccurring yet constantly changing patterns. Wright herself states that The Swan Book blends temporalities “like a multi-stranded helix of all times” (“Interview” n.p.). This helix always brings Oblivia back to the nimbus of the tree, and the space within herself that contains the hopeful and defiant image of the spectral homeland.

In an essay on writing Carpentaria, Wright refers to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and the “balance between the present moment and duration” that he believes defines Caribbean reality (“On Writing” 83). She states that indigenous Australians exist in “constant opposition between different spaces of time” and cites James Baldwin’s observation that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us” (qtd. in Wright 83), foregrounding the impact of the inheritance of colonial trauma on indigenous imaginings of the future. She says that in Carpentaria, “time is represented in the resilience of ancient beliefs

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overlaying the inherited colonial experience” while the “almost ‘fugitive’ future is being forged as imagination in what might be called the last frontier – the province of the mind” (83). For Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright, the possibility of forging the future, or retaining homelands, real and potential, begins with sovereignty. The ‘Tribe’ series, ‘Water’ and The Swan Book work through memory, activated within the present, to gesture toward future images that incorporate spectral homelands.

For Bloch, such texts are examples of how utopian art and literature goes beyond itself and moves towards that which has not yet been realised – the “desire to articulate, to form the face itself of that which has never before been heard” (Principle 1 275). Time is not a linear progression, for past and future are always contained in the present. He writes that the now “moves and propels itself through each day, whenever,” but that the present does not always open onto the now. Its “true contents have not come yet, other than in fragments” and the “propelling now” comprises the “tendencies within all that exists projected onto and atomised within the course of time” (215). The now therefore contains the past and the future – not as things to possess, but as “help and warning” (216). The now signifies a relationality towards time, with “true contents” – visions of difference and possibility – emerging through art and literature. Citing Franz Marc, Bloch states that “painting is our surfacing at some other place” (qtd. in Bloch Principle 1 206). For Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright, it seems that writing is not just surfacing in some other place, but also surfacing at some other time, which is also now, as anticipation within the present.

Conclusion

Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright assert the presence, sovereignty and futurity of indigenous peoples. They rewrite the presumption of indigenous apocalypse that dominates images of Australian futures, creating a space of indigenous determination and survivance. Using

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extrapolative techniques common to sf, they revise and extend the genre in response to the racist and speciest ideologies that underpin what Erika Cudworth terms ‘anthroparchy’ – the human domination of nature. All three writers firmly situate the human within extensive cultural networks of inter-species belonging, with their sovereignty tied to that of their country and its laws and stories, writing nature “in the active and intelligent voice” (Plumwood). In doing so, they transform silence – the imposition of subalternity – into a space of postcolonial resistance that begets multiple possibilities.

While magic realism and other Western genre categories may be used as a strategy to produce “another as a (lesser) version of oneself” (Ravenscroft 61), sf is being radically transformed by black, female, native and other ex- centric writers. Reading indigenous writing as postcolonial sf does not dispossess indigenous writers of their own stories and appropriate them into Western cultural norms. Rather, it provides a way of reading the texts that foregrounds the critical function of their future-thinking while also expanding the canonical and geographical centre of the genre.

Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright inscribe different futures into the ethnoscapes of Australian sf and cli-fi. These futures often create visions of homelands that rely on the very sovereignty threatened by the destruction of sacred and ancestral places. Their work serves as a radical counter- narrative to Eurocentric perceptions of ‘the native,’ deconstructing the categorical oppositions of tradition and modernity, science and magic, nature and culture, human and non-human, past and future, while also providing insight into the complex yet often peripheral issues of native sovereignty and land rights. For Wright, fiction provides the opportunity to “have a real conversation about the future,” and moves towards “ways of being together” (“Interview” n.p.) that include non-human subjects.

Dillon states that indigenous sf facilitates biskabiiyang, an Anishinaabe word denoting ‘returning to ourselves.’ Biskabiiyang involves

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discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world. (Dillon Walking 10)

Anchoring this process of decolonisation and healing is an assertion of presence, but also of futurity. Kwaymullina, van Neerven and Wright recognise that the ongoing struggle for sovereignty is also a struggle over the future. Their work therefore serves as a utopian intervention, rewriting indigenous apocalypse through an ecopoetics of hope and anticipation that encourages multiple, interconnected ways of being.

Coda

Cyclones of sand, torrents of dust. A hurricane moves through the country, turning it inside-out. It opens up the old veins of rivers that run south-west and out to sea, washing clean the bones hidden beneath decades of earth. Human bones. With angel winds and a swan’s flute around the neck. Did this old corpse know the music that kept this place alive?

A black veil blindfolds the moon on a cloudless night and turns into a swarm of long-necked birds that flock round and down. They plunge inside a warped old tree to sing those old bones right out of their grave. The birds leave a trail of ghost feathers that glisten in the silver midnight, marking their trail. They plummet down through the earth, down and down, to peck at the bones knitted in the roots of the tree.

As they sing their song of rustling wings and rainy sighs, the tree begins to grow. As it grows, it relinquishes the bones, and the swans pick them up one by one and make their escape, up through the trunk and back out into the blinding night. Their swan raga fills the air, and weaving

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through it there is a dreaming song, a bone flute song. The swan-girl’s ghost is playing.

Clouds begin to gather. Something awakens. The swans swallow the air, pregnant with rain, and rise higher and higher, above the clouds, where they can glide on the wind. They circle there, bones in beaks, and watch the water flush the sand out to sea.

The swamp settles against its ancient banks. The swans fly down, wearing the bones round their necks like memories, and alight on the water.

Everything is quiet.

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Conclusion

As these case studies demonstrate, the myriad futures emanating from the global periphery assert the presence, validity and futurity of those othered under the historical and aesthetic conditions of colonialism. For postcolonial writers whose material reality comprises science fictional scenarios such as first contact and apocalypse, imagining the future is, variously, a form of healing, an assertion of sovereignty and an act of decolonisation.

The authors discussed in this dissertation all participate in a utopian poetics of imagining the world otherwise. They deconstruct the gendered and hierarchical dualisms that characterise both sf and Western epistemologies – human and non-human, tradition and modernity, self and other – in diverse ways that grasp the necessity of transforming the present. From African-American, South African and indigenous Australian perspectives, they appropriate sf’s tropes to suggest new reading and writing practices that give voice to those silenced by hegemonic discourse. The writers grasp that alterity already exists in the present as latent potential and imagined difference. This exploration of difference – different species, worlds, social systems, technologies, genders, sexualities, histories – has always been sf’s remit and is what fuels its utopian locus. By reading postcolonial women’s sf in reference to Bloch’s theories, this dissertation has found that the critical and extrapolative function of utopianism manifests in myriad ways to imagine the future beyond empire. These are futures in which the other is not merely a reification of the self. Postcolonial women’s sf interrogates race and gender to suggest new ways of being in relation to others that, at the same time, do not negate the historical and material conditions under which that otherness has been produced.

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A central theme that unites all the texts is an interest in the figure of the human as a subject constructed in relation to other species, whether alien or animal. Although this dissertation has discussed some ideas of posthumanism, the texts unsettle fixed notions of the human so deeply that they raise the question of whether sf is, or can be, post- anthropocentric. Braidotti argues that post-anthropocentrism enlists multidisciplinary approaches, from digital culture to biogenetics, animal rights to sf, to anticipate what might proceed the anthropocentric subject (57-8). From the commodification of life in Butler to the assertion of saur subjectivities in Kwaymullina, the non-human comprises self-renewing and intelligent systems that transcend human organisation and control. Braidotti states that the “relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species” but also spans “all non-anthropomorphic elements” (60). This marks a significant shift in science fictional thinking, away from the techno-scientific futures of, for example, space opera, and towards multi-species worlds that recognise new and alien subjectivities in dehierarchised and mutually constitutive ontologies.

Through its fictional interventions, this dissertation also asserts that interdisciplinary approaches are needed in sf criticism to reflect how anticipatory consciousness must work outside of, rather than within, normative systems of representation and interpretation. The preludes and codas to the three chapters in this dissertation therefore strive to create dialogue across imaginative and critical forms to reflect the variegated expressions of postcolonial sf. If, as Julie Cruikshank argues, inequality is “maintained and reproduced through manipulation of symbols and the power to control representation” (164), then imagining new worlds in new ways may serve as a form of anticipatory consciousness.

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Impossible Things

A Novel

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Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the imagination

And the imagination does have flesh to destroy

And the flesh has imagination to sever

The mouth is just a body filled with imagination

Can you imagine its contents

Lyn Hejinian

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Part 1

Disappearances

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USRA

The water is visible only as a hazy line where land meets sky, as though an artist has drawn a long smudge of slate across a canvas, interrupting the rhythm of the landscape. It pulls the dull afternoon light into a long silver thread that winks at us from a distance. Tomorrow, the captain says, we will reach the sea. I always think of the sea as thirsty. It’s the salt, I suppose. Another desert to cross, and the last. But what waits for us on the other side?

I keep asking myself the same question, dozens of different ways. What is all this for? This skyship. This journey to Maradek. It seems so foolish now. I pace the decks beneath the ceaseless creak of the mast as my thoughts chase me round, circuit after circuit. I can’t live with them anymore but I can’t escape them either. I’m certain I’ll wear a path in the warped timber deck by the end of the journey. It’s comforting, in a way, to think that some impression of myself will remain here, even if the ship crashes into the sea and we’re drowned in waves of canvas sails and foam. The ship will remember me, if no one else does, by the tracks I leave. The sea will embrace me.

At the end of each long day I’m limp and I’ve managed to shed all thought. Sometimes I can’t even remember my daughter’s name. I cling to her in my sleep so she won’t disappear. I don't know why, but I sense that she’s slipping away. I’m afraid. Afraid of being left alone to suffer others’ choices.

I’ve been trying so hard to make sense of those choices. To make sense of everything. In his letters, my husband Pitr speaks of hope and peace and freedom, but they are just words. Words are enough to live by in his world but not in mine. If I could just go back, retrace my steps and find the point at which everything began to go wrong, I’d find my reason. So that’s what I

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do while I pace. I go over it again and again, but the only thing I’ve been able to come up with, the only thing close to a reason, is water.

That’s how I survive this. I think about the drought we’re leaving behind in Kalan. The skeleton trees and the cracked riverbeds and the wasted city. The land parched by slaves threshing the last drops from the inland reserves for the energy lords. It can’t go on. There is no water left. After the Thierran lords emerged victorious from the water feuds, they massacred the city’s elected officials and their militia – the Hand – hunted down all the elantar they could find. They’re slaves now, all of them, forced to use their magic to reap the living energy of the land, the rivers, the skies – all the ruh that sustains our world – to fuel their energy networks. Oh, we’d used these kinds of invocations before, but rarely, so rarely. The elantar warned us about upsetting the natural balance of things, of usurping that precious lifeblood, ruh. During my forty-five years, we’d called on Kalan’s elantar just a handful of times, and only when there was some terrible threat – a drought that would not break, a plague rampaging through the city. But since the Thierrans came to power fifteen years ago they’ve imprisoned all the elantar in an underground pit, and people say they torture them there. They cut out their tongues, burn their hands, put out their eyes, and rape the men and women alike – all to force them to perform the Reaping Invocation over and over again. Kalan’s pastures failed, its livestock died, its rivers soured and its trees withered, but still they reaped. We saw them in the Thierran skyships, the elantar and the cloaked figures of the Hand travelling further and further from the city to spread their death. Now our skies are scorched and barren and the air is thick with foul gases. All the energy from the reapings is stored in private grids beneath the energy lords’ compound. A little trickles into the market at drastically inflated prices, while the Hand patrols for illegal generators and flogs or executes those caught stealing from the official supply lines.

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Things only got worse after Pitr left for Maradek and his prestigious artists’ residency at the great conservatorium, the karzat. His work had been banned in Kalan for its political content. He couldn’t bear it anymore, I know – not being able to paint. And although he spoke of making a new future for us in Maradek – of sending us money until he could bring us across the sea to join him and of taking our daughter away from the dangers of Kalan – I had sensed something terrible lurking beneath the surface of things. It felt like an impenetrable cloud seeped into the corners of my vision, threatening to blind me. But I couldn’t translate the darkness I saw into words, so he remained unconvinced by what he saw as my pessimism, and he left.

He was true to his word. He wrote and sent money every week. But he had been gone no more than three weeks when the Thierrans cut off trade with Maradek. Everyone knows it’s to drive up water prices. Since we can’t trade with the Maradeki we’re forced to go to the water yards and pay the exorbitant fees to wait with thousands of others, clutching our barrels and buckets, hoping that when the sluice gates open there’ll be enough. People are trampled there. Killed for their water. But when I heard the decree, I wasn’t thinking about water. I was thinking of Pitr. Without the Madadeki ships we had no way of communicating. There would be no more letters. No more money. No chance of being together again. How would he come home when his residency finished? How could we reach him, if he did manage to win a permanent position? The Thierrans would never allow us to leave. It would set a precedent.

We had heard rumours of skyships like this one. Salvaged vessels, operating illegally and run by pirates and thieves and deserters, were setting sail for Rhun and Cordoba and Maradek – cities beyond the reach of the Thierrans. Places where there was no elantry, places not free-falling into desolation for the sake of a few rich lords. Pitr and I had discussed them before he was offered the position at the karzat and decided against

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risking such a dangerous voyage. But then everything changed. Ada and I had to take this chance. Is it a foolish chance? Maybe it’s just desperate. You can be desperate and foolish; it’s much harder to be desperate and wise.

There is water in Maradek. An abundance of water, Pitr says. Rivers and fountains and rain. He describes these things in tremendous detail and these are the sections of his letters I read over and over again. I skip over the paragraphs about the people and the art and the politics, seeking only water.

Water is my reason now. There are other reasons, I’m sure. Better reasons. All the reasons my husband writes about. He speaks of freedom and of the future as though they’re seeds you can plant and water from time to time until they blossom. But everything I’ve ever planted has turned to weed.

As an artist, Pitr thinks he can school me in perspective. On the few occasions I’ve tried to paint, my compositions are flat and linear; on canvas I have a two-dimensional mind. Nevertheless, I like how the thin veneer of paint barely covers the rough cloth stretched on the frame. Pitr says I need to create depth, but I know it’s all just illusion. I am an astronomer, and I know distance and scale. I know the infinitude of space, the infinitesimal life that grows into the galaxy. If that isn’t perspective then I don’t know what is. It certainly can’t be rendered in oil and gouache and hung in a gallery.

It’s not his words that I read now. It’s the silences. The empty spaces between things are slowly wearing me down, one layer at a time. I feel thin, my skin stretched taut like one of Pitr’s canvases. Sometimes I wonder if I’m becoming transparent. People’s eyes slide over me as if I’m not even there. I watch Ada, sitting at the bow of the skyship, looking out at the point where the world disappears and closes in on itself, but I have no idea what she is thinking. I know she misses her father and I wonder if that is

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her reason. Does she think of water? Does she think of elantry? Of art? At times I’m afraid of her, because when I look into her eyes my own silence stares back at me, and there is something dangerous in the wayward compass of her gaze. It spins me around and points me back to myself, and I can see that I’m about to drift off into nowhere. It terrifies me then, to see what we’re doing to her, her father and I. I know it shouldn’t be that way, that I should look at my daughter and see a reason, but all I can give myself, over and over, is water.

I feel guilty, even though this is no one’s fault, and perhaps that is why the silence finds me such easy prey. But I don’t want the silence to invade her, too, so I try the best I can to fight it off. But if she has any sense – and I know she does, she is my daughter, after all – then she must be terrified, because this is the last chance, isn’t it? The only chance. There is no going back. And who knows what lies on the other side of the sea.

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ADA

The skyship smells like the pig pits in Kalan, with so many sick passengers below decks holed up in their own filth. It sounds like the pits too. The groans roil round the hold, smothering people with misery deep in the fetid dark. Water, they croak. Water, please. But there are strict rations and none to spare, especially if you can’t afford to bribe the crew. People die every day and they can’t stay on board as dead weight. We watch as they’re cast off and plummet through the sky. Human comets. Old light. I wonder where they’ll end up. Food for crows, a teenage boy whispers to his younger brother at one of these burials, and we look at each other, eyes wide, imagining our own loved ones dead and broken in the dust. The tearing of the flesh, the shredding of the limbs, the bleaching of the bones under the long white sun.

I lie awake at night, blanketed in Mami’s snoring, and pray we don’t get sick, don’t run out of water or get caught in a storm and wind up in the desert as unknown and unclaimed corpses to be picked apart by hungry creatures with yellow eyes. I picture the skyship trailing bodies, the way children in old stories drop stones so they can find their way home. But we are not going back home. Ever. Papa is waiting for us in the great city across the sea: Maradek.

After dark we’re given a cup of water and a piece of hard bread greening at the edges. Then we’re locked in the hold until morning. We lie on top of our meagre belongings – a bundle of clothes, a sack of books, a marriage vase – and try to sleep, pressed cheek to cheek, eye to eye. Even though our apartment in Kalan was tiny – just two rooms on the third floor of a crumbling building in the south-east slums – I’d always had my own bed, my own space, in a curtained-off corner of Mami and Papa’s room. I’d had a window, too, though it only looked out at a brick wall, but if I craned my neck I could catch a glimpse of sky through the lopsided tenements of the

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district, or the street corner, where stray dogs and beggars with matted hair and cell-block ribs picked through the gutter trash.

Down in the hold, the healthy stick to one side, the sick the other. There’s a sliver of unoccupied space in between, a no man’s land. To make our way up on deck each morning we have to navigate this precarious terrain, trying not to trip over the feet that jut out. Even though I try not to look too closely, I can’t shut out the sound of the breath guttering in their throats or the groaning that seems to come from deep down in their bellies. At the very end, they aren’t there anymore. They can’t see any light, they don’t respond to their names, and they whisper in fever-speech about a land of skulls and jackals. I put my hand over my mouth and my nose when I walk past, the way everyone does, and I try not to think about them too much. It’s hard enough just surviving the nights down there without worrying about what’s happening on the far side of the hold.

We’ve been on board this skyship three-and-a-half weeks now. I’ve kept count. Orgol, the captain, says we’ll reach Maradek in four days. Five. A week at most. His estimates expand all the time. The whole journey was only supposed to take three weeks, but the crew have struggled with the wind from the beginning. At first they argued about whether they could use a Weather Invocation, but none are elantar, so they have to rely on pure shipcraft to keep us going – something they seem to know little of. We move sluggishly, as though ploughing the sky. It’s only by chance that we pick up speed at times, but when we do we rush forward to feel the wind lash at our faces before it falls away and we slow again, back to a limping land speed.

Though they’re like us – Kalani, fleeing – the crew don’t see us that way. We work among them, emptying night soil buckets, scrubbing the deck and sieving rice for weevils, but they seem to resent us nevertheless. To them, we’re freight, no better than animals, and they shout at us and strike us if we’re slow to follow orders. They herd us down into the hold at night

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and piss on us through the cracks in the boards when they’re drunk. We’ve learned quickly to make ourselves as invisible as possible, to cling together so no one person should stand out.

In the morning of the thirty-first day, Mami and I work with some of the other women, darning sails. When we finish, I decide not to join Nisa’s language class for the day. Nisa is the only one who speaks Maradeki – she used to be an interpreter, long before I was born – and she’s been teaching us the basic phrases we’ll need when we arrive. Although there’s something familiar about the rhythm of the language, I can’t seem to remember the vocabulary or master the pronunciation. My mind seems too loose to hold on to anything these days.

After folding the sail and packing the stitching kit away, I wander aft. I can feel Mami’s eyes on me, tracking my every move. I hate that there’s nowhere to be alone on board this ship. The best I can do is nestle between coils of rope at the bowspirit and hope no one approaches me. Words don’t come easily to me in the first place, and I don’t like talking with the others about why we left home, or what we’ll do when we reach Maradek. Mami and I have to find Papa and we won’t do that by making friends on board the ship. Besides, it’s none of their business.

Sometimes Mami joins the language class, but she usually keeps to herself too, reading Papa’s letters from Maradek over and over while she paces the decks. When the voyage began she talked about how we’d find Papa once we arrived.

“We’ll speak to the city officials,” she said on one of our first nights in the hold, before anyone was sick. “We’ll show them the letters. We’ll be taken straight to the karzat. Or perhaps they’ll summon him down to the docks. He might have to vouch for us. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we’ll be together.”

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I hadn’t trusted this newfound optimism. It wasn’t like her. She was the one who’d said Papa couldn’t expect to be treated like any other artist in Maradek. She said that he’d be an outsider to them. Why, now, was she placing so much trust in them? Maybe she was just trying to reassure me, but back in Kalan she’d never have said something just to make me feel better. It wasn’t her way. She held herself to standards higher than that. At least she’s stopped talking about it now, sensing, perhaps, that her speculations offer as little comfort to me as they do to her.

I make a circuit of the ship and find myself at the bow. Some of the men are sitting together, not talking, sharing a cigarette around. A group of boys play sackball nearby. I tried to join their tourney once, but Haydar, a big boy of thirteen, is a tyrant, taking any opportunity to strike or kick others under the guise of a tackle. The boys play four-a-side, mostly for his favour. I’m good with my elbows – I can defend myself – and I’m quick. I scored a goal, so Haydar punched me in the stomach and called me a cheat. I haven’t played since.

I nestle into my spot at the bow. From there I can watch the land slide by below. I’ve never been out of the city before, never imagined the country could be this vast and lonely. I’ve spent much of the journey watching the barren plains inch by, tracking the dry riverbeds that look like wrinkles in loose, rough skin, surveying abandoned towns. Mami says the plains were forested, once, but they’d all been devastated during the First Reaping, the year before I was born. I’ve seen pictures in my school books and read some of the histories too. Papa said that once there’d been many different kind of elantar – those who could heal the sick, those who could communicate with animals, those who could make forests and gardens grow. Some were even artists. The first elantir had designed our religious ceremonies, including the iade at Edda, when we worship the goddess of light, Nura. But after the feuds, elantry became a terrible thing – a sacrilegious power damning those who practised it. Any elantir who’d

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avoided enslavement hid their ability, although many were turned in to the Hand by friends or family hoping for favours. We saw them sometimes, at the docks, boarding the Thierran ships that bore them hither and thither for fresh Reapings. I never saw their faces – they were always hooded, chained and silent – but their presence was heavy, almost magnetic, like the dead stars Mami had told me about. Crumpling into themselves. Consuming their own weight. Their slow, massive presence drew me in; whenever we passed by them, Mami and Papa had to pull me away. It was hard not to picture myself in their place, kept in darkness, my tongue cut out, forced to turn against the forces I’d always protected in the past. Many Kalani despise them, but me – I pity them.

It’s late in the day when we see the ocean for the first time, a relief after weeks of unending desert. Oceanus. I mouth it to myself, savouring the way my lips move from a kiss to a smile and back to a kiss. I like the way it looks and sounds, so broad and smooth and cool. Papa is on the other side of the big water and now that we’re teetering on the edge, about to cross the last border between us and him, I feel as though we’re finally drawing close. I scramble to my feet and lean forward, one hand reaching out to trace the horizon.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I snatch my hand back and turn to face a tall girl with a geyser of black curls. I know her. She’s the daughter of Ediz, who was a carpenter in Kalan, and has done some impromptu repairs on board the ship. She leans over the rail beside me, resting her chin on her folded arms, so close her elbow almost touches mine.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” she says.

“You talk too much,” I say, turning away. It’s rude, but true. Lahle is always talking – talking about what Maradek will be like, asking the crew every day how much longer the journey will take.

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“That’s what my mother used to say,” Lahle says. “She used to complain that it was like living with a squawking jay.”

“She’s not with you?” I ask, keeping my distance. I already know the answer – Lahle is here with her father, Ediz, and her uncle, Emre. Just the three of them. No mother, no sister. “Is she already in Maradek?”

“No,” she says. “She died last year. We’re from Minkara.”

“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

I try to study her in my peripheral vision. Lahle’s taller than me, but only just – I’m tall for my age, too. We both take after our fathers in that way, then. She’s reed thin, and I find myself looking at her hands where they grasp her upper arms. I notice the bulge of veins and tendons at her wrist, the knot of the callused knuckles, the chewed-down nails and the dirt in the beds. They remind me of Papa’s hands. Artist’s hands.

“Minkara’s only small, but it used to be a big oil town,” says Lahle. “It’s not safe anymore. No water, no work. Lots of us are leaving.”

“Why?”

“The Hand,” she says. “They came through and set fire to all the oil fields. It was chaos. They were searching all the apartments, all the old factories. They killed a lot of people. The oil lords, of course. They doused them in their own oil and set them alight in the town square. But a lot of regular people died or disappeared, too. People who just got in the Hand’s way. Like my mother.”

I turn towards her, not sure of what to say. Her face betrays no emotion and for that I admire her. She’s not looking at me now, she’s studying the horizon. I notice the dry skin scabbing in the corners of her lips, the dusting of tiny hairs on her cheeks. I look away, gazing out at the horizon too.

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“What about you?” Lahle asks. “Where’s your father?”

“In Maradek,” I say. “He left a few months ago.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“He got an invitation to work at the conservatorium for a year. The position was only for him. We couldn’t go with him.”

“Oh,” says Lahle. She folds her arms and shifts her weight so she’s facing me directly. I find myself turning towards her and mimicking her stance. “That must have been hard.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Has he told you what it’s like?”

“A little, in his letters.”

“And?”

I’m unsure of how much to tell her – whether to describe what my father says or what I think he leaves out.

“He says there is peace there,” I say. “He talks about the art, mostly. He’s a painter and a sculptor.”

“And is the art different to Kalani art?” says Lahle. “Is that what makes it so peaceful?”

I hesitate, unsure if she’s making fun of me.

“It’s different,” I say. “He says there’s a different quality of light in Maradek that changes the way he sees.”

Papa’s words feel clumsy, like they don’t fit me properly, and I wonder if Lahle will scoff at me, but she only nods at me to go on.

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“There are ceremonies for the creation of new art,” I say. “It’s a religious practice. He says the Maradeki believe it connects them with their ancestors.”

“And what do these ancestors do?”

“Interpret the artwork,” I say. “And give special signs.”

“Signs? What kind of signs?”

“Signs that tell them what to do.”

“Like what?”

I hesitate, then shake my head. “I don’t know,” I admit. “He says you have to see it to understand it.”

“It sounds amazing, don’t you think?” she says. When she smiles I can see the uneven line of her teeth.

“Yes,” I say. “Almost impossible.”

“Impossible?” asks Lahle. “What do you mean?”

I hesitate. Lahle shifts her weight and casts her gaze back out across the sea, giving me space to think.

“Well, I suppose I’m just afraid,” I admit. “No one knows what’s going to happen, do they? It’s almost like it’s dangerous to hope for too much.”

“But I believe in happiness,” says Lahle, turning back to face me. “The right to happiness. Don’t you?”

I notice she has one grey eye, one green – unusual for a Kalani. We’re dark-skinned, dark-eyed people. I look away and try to focus on the sea but I can’t. I sense her there, as though waiting, but at last she turns and walks away without saying anything and I’m relieved. Sometimes it’s okay to talk, but I still don’t find it easy.

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I look back out at the ocean. The waves are like fingers summoning me and the afternoon light weaving through the current reminds me of the grey prayer mats at temple. For a moment I can smell the incense on Edda. I think of the chanting of the prayers and the flickering candles, the ascension of light towards the heavens. But the salt air reminds me of blood, and the rolling waves shatter the late afternoon light so for a moment the sea spray in the lowering sun is red and I see crimson splashed across a tabernacle, like on that final Edda.

It will not be like that in Maradek. I wonder if they recognise Edda, or if there’s some other festival of light. I’m curious to see the ceremonies Papa has written about, but also wary, in a way, of giving too much of myself away. At the same time, I’m eager to shed my old self and become someone else. We’re used to being shunned in Kalan because of Papa’s art and his reputation. In Maradek, I’m afraid that we’ll be shunned in new ways we won’t know how to deal with. Papa talks around this but I sense an unbelonging in each of his letters. They’re written with words that aren’t quite his own anymore, yet he doesn’t speak in a new tongue either. He is somewhere in between. I know I expect too much from Maradek. I know Papa has prepared us to expect too much, but now we can’t expect less. There’s only the future. We can’t go back.

It had been one of Papa’s friends who’d told us about the ship. After Papa left to take up the position at the karzat in Maradek, Fadel would check in on us, share the letters Papa had sent him and tell us how the rest of their artist’s group was doing. Few of them had work anymore. Most had been banned from exhibiting in the city’s two remaining galleries. Like Papa, Fadel had been targeted by the Hand and they’d been forced to stand by and watch their work burned in the Purges after their exhibition together. We were lucky, really, that Papa hadn’t been dragged to the prison inside the Thierran compound where they kept elantar. Dozens were taken in that way, without explanation, without any trial. Papa wanted to keep

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painting but he knew it put us all in danger. Maybe that’s when he began to think of leaving. He was always talking about the great Maradeki artists, the classicists from whom, he said, all ideas about proportion and depth descended. It surprised us all when the offer came a few months later. We didn’t even know he’d written to Maradek. A year in residence at the karzat, with the opportunity to give several lectures and present an exhibition at the city’s most holy site, the temple known as the halantek. Best of all, there was a salary that surpassed everything he’d earned as a portraitist and labourer since the Purge, as well as a respectability he could reclaim, I think, both as an artist and as a father. Blanka, the head of the karzat, knew a little about Kalani art and seemed sympathetic to our situation. He knew he had to go. He wanted Fadel to go with him, but Fadel’s wife had a newborn. He wouldn’t leave them. I know Mami admired Fadel for this. I wonder if that’s why Mami fawned over Fadel so much on his visits, playing the smiling hostess and giving him tea and rice we couldn’t spare. In him, she saw the choices her husband hadn’t made. Hadn’t been brave enough to make.

I’d walked in from school early one day to find Fadel talking to Mami. I’d hear the words skyship and Corlu but they quickly changed the topic, talking about Papa’s latest letter. There was some money on the table but Mami stuffed it into her pocket. When he left, I saw her slip the money into Fadel’s hand and he gave her some papers which she hid under her mattress. When she went to the market the next day, I snuck them out. There was a name and a time. A few nights later, she woke me when it was still dark outside. There was no moon. She’d packed some things. There was a bag waiting by the door. I didn’t have to ask where we were going. We snuck out to the street. A man was waiting with a black car – it had the chassis of a sedan but a jerry-rigged ute on the back with fat tyres and a crude tarp as a canopy. Mami showed him the papers and he gestured us into the back. Another family was already there – a young couple with a sleeping baby. We stopped at a few other places, moving south through the

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city, until there were fifteen of us crammed in the flatbed. No one spoke as we made the long drive to Corlu, where the ship was waiting out the back of an old gas station in the middle of the otherwise deserted town hidden behind a low wall of hills. When we got there, the captain said there wasn’t enough space for everyone, and half the people in the back of the ute had been left behind, including the couple with the child. As Mami and I boarded, I could hear the driver shouting with another man about what he was supposed to do with them. That first night, the sleepless hold was thick with bodies and fear as the ship creaked and swayed its way south- east. Mami clutched Papa’s letters to her chest and never let them go. I heard her whispering – praying, perhaps, or cursing – Pitr, Pitr. But I wasn’t thinking of Papa. Instead, I kept picturing the way the baby’s lower lip glistened and how its dimpled hands grabbed the neck of its mother’s tunic. She’d batted it away, her face grim, after the crew had finally managed to get the starter engine going, and the wind had filled the sails as we lurched skyward. Their figures had been swallowed in the dust and the dark. I thought I’d heard the baby cry out but it might have just been the scream of the propellers.

The wind picks up, bringing the smack of the briny sea. I look down again, dangling my arms over the ship’s worn timber rail. There is a village huddled on the shore but we don’t dock there as we have at other places on the way. I see people working among a tangle of fishing boats pulled up to a stone quay, their faces raised to watch us pass. Orgol says there’ll be no more stops until we reach Maradek. This is the last leg, the last big push. A week on the crossing, and then we’ll be there. Maradek. Papa. I can taste the salt on the wind and though it stings the open sores on my lower lip where I’ve worried away the tender flesh in my sleep, I savour it.

We pass over the little village, its houses so small and warped they look like detritus washed up on the shore, and move out slowly, high above the waves. I look back and see other passengers crowding the decks to witness

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the crossing of the border. Even the sackball players have paused in their game to observe this moment. No one looks back. I can see Mami, her dress unravelling at the neck, her tangle of black, wiry hair tied up in an old blue scarf. She is very still, her back stiff, and though her eyes are on the horizon I don’t think she’s really looking at anything. She’s probably thinking of Papa – wondering what he’s doing, how we’ll find him. There was no way to send a letter, no way to let him know. Everyone on board this vessel will arrive unannounced without the proper passes. At least Mami and I have Papa’s letters – evidence that someone is waiting for us, that we have some claim to a life in Maradek and haven’t just flung ourselves blindly into the void.

The light has turned grey and the sunset glimmers low at the ship’s heel. I rise and begin to make my way back to the hold with the other passengers. We know the rules now. Orgol stands at the capstan and watches us go. His nose and mouth are lopsided so it seems as if all his features are sliding down towards his chin. His eyes are yellow and he always reeks of sweat and those dreadful yendu leaves he smokes – cow shit and tar. As we pass down into the hold, we hold out our cups for a dash of water and take our bowl of rice and piece of bread from the first mate, Ridvan. He keeps a whip looped around his belt for impromptu lashings. I lower my eyes as I shuffle past and take my share, then clamber down into the hold. I feel his black eyes on my back, like a hand poised, ready to push me down.

It’s gloomy below, and I pick my way carefully through the mire of bodies towards Mami, who waits in our spot by the window, her cup already empty, crumbs in her lap. I catch a glimpse of Lahle, sitting cross-legged next to her father and uncle. They’re sleeping near the Beszels, a brother and sister not much older than me from our own neighbourhood. Their father had made the travel arrangements for the whole family, but he and his wife died in a mining accident the week before they left. It was their places Mami and I had taken. The Beszels don’t speak to us. We have too

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much of a reputation already as the family of the Purged artist, the strange girl in the eighth grade who never speaks to anyone and has no friends. Not that these things matter much now. Life before we boarded the ship seems tentative, dreamlike. What lies before us is the more immediate thing. Life after. Life beyond.

I settle next to Mami, facing away from the other side of the hold where the sick and dying lie. Later, the shadows will thicken around the bodies, and they’ll seem to distend and form a malignant mass. I do my best to ignore them.

“Where have you been?” asks Mami as I sit and begin to gnaw at a corner of my bread. It’s like eating a blanket.

“Nowhere,” I say. I offer the rest of the bread to Mami but she shakes her head.

“You should eat,” she says. “Keep up your strength.”

Despite this ridiculous statement, I chew and chew, sipping in between each bite. When I’m finished she folds me to her breast and we lie curled together like two question marks. I’m too old to be held, but I think it makes her feel safe, so I submit to her embrace.

“Should I read tonight?” she asks.

“No,” I say. She insists on reading Papa’s letters aloud almost every night by the dim light of our one remaining candle. Other people listen in. I resent this. We have so little privacy; I’d like to make sure Papa’s words stay between us.

“Maybe we can just talk,” she says. She brushes my knotted hair back, her nails scraping my scalp. I wince and try to squirm away. She releases me and I turn to face her.

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“What do you want to talk about?” I say. The sun has set outside and her face is dim and blurry in the near-dark, her eyes two dim points of light. Someone moans, cries out. A child begins to wail and the mother hums a lullaby, but halfway through the tune falters and dies, and the child screams over a chorus of angry shushing.

“Well?” I prompt.

Mami closes her eyes, folds her arms around her belly.

“Nothing,” she says.

“Nothing?”

“No,” she says. As she turns away from me I hear her swallow. Is she crying? She never cries. She says crying wastes water.

I should say something to her. Reach out, touch her shoulder, make her turn over and look at me. But I don’t. I lie down, my back to her back so I can feel her breathing, feel it slow and deepen as she falls asleep.

Nothing, I recite to myself in time with her breath. Nothing nothing nothing.

* * *

I dream of Edda – the last Edda, two years ago. We’re walking east towards the Old Temple, but it’s not the temple I remember. There’s been some kind of battle overnight and there are fires still smoking in the forecourt, and great cracks in the walls of the portico and entrance hall. The dome has collapsed, so all the beautiful statues that once stood on top are shattered, and we have to pick our way through amputated hands and shoulders and faces. I’m not wearing shoes and I keep stumbling.

Inside, things seem normal. The priests pass out candles and we kneel in rows on the grey prayer mats. After we’ve finished praying, it’s time for the

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iade. The priests begin to lead us in in the chorus. Our voices swell and fill the hall, and when we reach a crescendo the flames of the candles soar upwards. But instead of forming a great orb of light they’re sucked into a vortex, a black hole filling all the space above. There’s a tremendous crash and for a moment I think the temple itself has exploded into a storm of stone and light, but when I open my eyes the building is intact and I’m lying among the bodies of the other worshippers. They’re no longer recognisable – they’ve all become shadows. The priests are dressed in the hoods of the Hand and I’m the one controlling the light, sucking it through the vortex and into myself with hands like claws. I’m reaping all the ruh from the worshippers, emptying them of all their light. Beside me, a dull light flickers in the enervated eyes of one of the shadows and I think I recognise my Papa. I see myself reflected there: a slave.

I wake with a shout, lurching upright. For a moment all the bodies around me seem like the bodies from my dreams, reaped of their light. I put my head between my knees and breathe deeply until reality filters back in: first, the smell – humid, animal – and then the sounds. Shifting bodies, murmured dream-speech and the occasional groan, choked-off and keening, from over on the other side of the hold.

I know I won’t be able to get to sleep again. After nightmares like these, I lie awake for hours, sometimes until dawn. Mami is snoring deep down in her throat, so I know she won’t wake until the crew opens the hatch and lets us up. Her limbs are loose, her mouth open. I turn my back on the slush of bodies and peer out the grimy window. I can’t see much – just grey on darker grey.

I can’t help but miss Kalan on nights like these, despite the poverty, the violence, the fear. I miss the small details that form the familiar fabric of my old life. My narrow bed with the quilt handmade from old knitting squares Mami collected from the market. Coming home from school to the strains of a scratched zither record emanating from Mrs Maro’s apartment

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down the hall. Most of all, I miss slow mornings with Papa, before Mami wakes, making tea and sitting in the corner he called his studio, the timber screens pulled back while we study his work-in-progress.

“What do you think?” he would say, looking at the outline of a painting or the half-formed sculpture.

“It needs more energy,” I would reply, or perhaps, “you haven’t found the right point-of-view.”

No matter what I said – and sometimes I couldn’t think of anything so I’d have to make it up – he’d nod and make a note in his journal. He said I was his favourite collaborator. I miss that. I miss him. The places that remind me of him. The times, the rituals. The three-day-old tea leaves in the strainer. The weight of his body next to mine on the threadbare two-seater couch. Sometimes this longing borders on self-pity. That’s what Mami says nostalgia is. Misplaced sympathy, a pathetic reminiscence. She says you bring what matters with you when you leave home – that there’s nothing worth missing that can’t be recovered. But how can she expect me to believe her, sitting there, poring over my absent father’s letters again and again? Home is gone forever. We both know that.

I’m suddenly aware of the thick slag of tongue that scratches the roof of my mouth. I thought I was used to thirst, but I’ve never been as thirsty as I am on board this ship. I spend a lot of time wondering how long it might take to die of thirst. Three days? Four? Could you last a week? What if you only had bread? Rice?

To distract myself, I get out the little leather pouch I keep my most treasured possessions in. A little statue of Nura that Papa made me. A ring Mami said had been her mother’s, the metal dim and the garnet cracked. And the seed.

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I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help myself. As I hold it in my cupped hands, it begins to glow with a soft inner light, and when I turn it over, the grey outside the ship’s window turns golden and viscous, and it distends across the hold, seeping through the drowsing bodies until they’re submerged in light and disappear. In front of me, a door opens, becomes a pane of light, and I pitch headlong, into the memory.

* * *

It was my ninth birthday. Papa took us on a trip out of the city – he said he had a surprise for me.

We borrowed Mrs Maro’s car, a little hatch with plastic sheeting instead of glass for windows. We weren’t supposed to leave the city before curfew lifted so we took the back streets to avoid being seen. They were empty except for a few cab drivers and shaw runners preparing for the morning shift. We passed the laundries where a group of grey-faced women were beating rugs with old racquets, the whump-whump-whump scaring a cat with burnt blanks out from beneath a cluster of garbage bags. We skirted the east edge of the market, with its patchwork tents and stalls improvised from broken doors and cinder blocks. All the shop fronts in the streets were still closed, the windows adorned with hand-painted signs and streamers of plaited plastics. We passed out of the business district and the Thierran compound came into view – the poles and wires of their elantric power station looming over the low white stucco buildings, the dark figures of the Hand patrolling the roofs and covering the entrances.

We turned away and sped through the industrial zone and the killing yards in the sputtering hatch, the scent of blood and metalwork thick on my tongue, and then through the wastelands festering round Kalan like scabs. Papa turned right, away from the southern deserts, and took us across the plains that led up to the mountains. After the Third Reaping, all the trees had been harvested for timber and the rest now lay warped and broken in

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the dust. There was a dusty road, and we traced it all the way to the foot of the mountains, where it petered out and became little more than a walking trail. The ascent was gentle and rolling at first, then lurched up a steep incline. Papa pressed down on the accelerator but the car stalled and threatened to roll backwards. Mami yelped and seized my hand but Papa drove on, revving the engine and cursing as he grappled with the gearstick. Mami squeezed my hand as we crawled uphill, leaning forward the whole time. At last we came to a little plateau large enough for the car to nestle against the mountainside, and we all got out. Papa walked over to a faded set of stairs and began to climb. Mami and I followed.

“There was once a lookout up here,” he said over his shoulder. Mami and I were cautious, using hands and feet to navigate the dusty steps. “I used to hike up here with my father when I was your age, Ada. There were so many trees then. A whole forest.”

“What was it like?” I asked. He’d told me before but I never tired of hearing his descriptions.

“It was vast,” he said. “Some of the trees were thousands of years old. Birds lived here. Animals of all kinds. There were flowers and grasses and insects. The soil was so moist. The water welled up in puddles after it rained and that would bring out the worms, and then the birds would fly down and eat them.”

There had still been forests when I was young, but not like before. I’d been born in the fifth year of a drought that had never broken, and I could hardly imagine forests the likes of which my parents had seen. What I knew was parched riverbeds, white with salt, and corpses of trees rotting in sun-baked mudflats that had once been corn fields. I had a vague memory of rain, when I was three. Dancing. We’d twirled through the streets, holding our buckets aloft, singing, and it had felt like a blessing, each drop a kiss or a prayer. We’d hoped that was the end of it, but the rain hadn’t

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come again for another year, and then it was grey and pale, like string. Not the way I remembered from the first time.

It was a long, hard climb up the mountain and I was out of breath by the time we reached a narrow platform etched into an outcropping just shy of the ridge. Beyond the crumbled edge, the hillside fell away to a sheer drop. Mami arrived last, puffing, and leaned against Papa’s shoulder, wiping the sweat away with the back of her hand.

From our vantage point we had a view of the hillside and the plains, a great swathe of land that had hardened and turned white. I saw the long narrow depressions that had once been rivers, now runnels of grey dust, and the husks of the dead trees lying here and there like dashes.

“Tell me more about the trees, Papa,” I said. I wanted to picture the forest the way it had been but I couldn’t see past the dust pricking my eyes and the heat of the day thickening around me.

“The greatest were the redtrunks,” he said. “They had thick skin but inside were veins of golden sap you could make into honey and jam. In the summer the canopies grew like vaulted ceilings of thatch and the light through the branches cast a gold veil over everything. The grass would grow so tall it was like a yellow sea. And in the winter – that was my favourite time – the redtrunks’ boughs became lazy and pendulous, and the rain would run off them in silver fountains you could drink from.”

“But the red-trunks weren’t the only trees,” added Mami. “There were the dogwoods, too, remember. And the alders, and the poplars, and the ladyferns, and the yellowbarks. So many different kinds, Ada.”

We stood there for a long time, looking at the dead trees. I tried to imagine what it was like. The light dripping off the leaves, pooling in the clearings. The smell of pine needles crushed in moist topsoil. The sound of the river rushing over beds of mica and the bulrushes swaying in the current. For a

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moment I thought I had it, and then the dust caught in my throat and Papa thumped me on the back while I coughed, bringing me back to the present.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you the surprise.”

He began back down the slope and I followed, then Mami. It was harder going – slippery and vertiginous. When we were partway down, Papa veered from the path and led us across the mountainside. He stopped at the husk of a tree, its crown and roots like frozen veins. He knelt beside it and reached into a hollow, his shoulder pressed against the brittle trunk, his hand rummaging within.

“Ah!” he said at last, and withdrew his arm. There was something small cradled in the palm of his hand but he hid it behind his back before I could see what it was.

“Close your eyes,” he said, “and hold out your hands.” When I obeyed, he placed the object in my cupped palms. “Now open.”

It looked like some sort of stone, but it wasn’t heavy enough for that. And it was too perfect, as though carved by an artist. Leaf-scaped scales protruded from its core. It was dark brown, tapering to grey along its scalloped edges. It has the same wooden texture as the trees, the same aura, of something lapsed and now irrevocable. I showed it to Mami, perplexed.

“It’s a seed,” she said. “From a pine tree. A kozalakli. But how can that be? Is it real?” We both looked at Papa.

“Yes,” he said. “Fadel and I found them here when we came to sketch. Look.” He directed us to the hollow in the tree. I peered inside. There were four more lying inside, each whole like this one. Each one perfect and impossible.

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“It’s a miracle,” said Papa. “I thought Ada would like to have one on her birthday.” Mami smiled down at Papa and put one hand on his shoulder. Together, they crouched by the hollow and studied the remaining seeds, their heads close together like two children playing at a private game.

I turned the seed over and over in my hands. It must have longed to take root in the soil. It must have longed to grow. I knew it had once been part of another tree, and that that tree came from the seed of another, in a long line of ancestors. In a way, it was already centuries old.

I hugged the seed close to my belly and closed my eyes. I thought I could hear the rustle of leaves, feel the trickle of rainwater on my skin.

It began slowly, with a sensitivity to light. The light soaked into me and made me tremble. I felt water rise from the earth, through my feet, and flow beneath the surface of my skin. With the water came breath, and each breath was steeped in light.

I started to grow. My toes turned to roots and they anchored me in the earth. My legs and my belly thickened, fortified by fresh rings of tough red skin. My arms lengthened and, from my fingers, fresh shoots grew. Soon I was many-limbed, multitudinous, so tall I could touch the sky, and I danced in the cool breeze, my foliage like great fans that sent seeds scattering across the mountainside. Time passed. The seeds took root and began to grow. I took root and began to grow, for each seed was connected to me – a thought from one central mind, a breath from one central life. I spread and spread across the mountainside, and I swayed beneath the slow wheel of the stars, which blurred into great wheels of light as sheets of gossamer rain fell and trickled down my spine to the forest floor.

“Ada.”

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Mami’s voice interrupted me. Abruptly, I was me again. A girl standing in the dust of the mountain. Mami and Papa turned away from the fallen tree to look at me. No, not me, I realised – the seed.

It had grown into a seedling. Fresh pine needles erupted through the seed casing and new roots twined through my fingers. I studied it in wonder, recalling the sensation of light and water moving through my body. Had I done this? But how? I had only been imagining it, hadn’t I? I had only been dreaming.

I looked back to Mami. Her nostrils were flared and her hands were clenched against her thighs. She was afraid of me.

I dropped the seedling in the dust and stepped away from it, brimming with shame.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

Papa stepped in front of Mama. “I know.” His voice was low and reassuring. He approached slowly, as though I was a wary animal, and knelt so his eyes were closer to level with mine.

“I don’t know how this happened,” I said. “I was just – I was thinking about the trees, Papa. That’s all.”

Papa looked down at the plant. I willed it to shrivel up and turn to dust.

“Is this the first time this has happened?” he asked.

I nodded vigorously. I could feel sweat collecting in the small of my back, the basin of my throat.

“This is dangerous, Ada,” he said. “The Hand – ”

“They’re always looking for people like you,” said Mami. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Papa. He glanced up at her from his

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kneeling position and then got to his feet and dusted off his knees. He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind, and sighed.

“She’s right,” he said. “We have to hide this. We can’t let them make you one of their elantar.”

Elantar. The word made my hands tremble. I swallowed. I wasn’t like them, was I? I couldn’t be.

“You’ll have to learn to control yourself,” he said. “You’ll have to hide your abilities. Or, better yet, never use them.”

“Never let them develop,” said Mami. “Like smothering a flame.”

Papa turned to face her, a crease between his eyes and his lips pursed. But Mami stared back at him, her black eyes meeting his steadily, and he turned back to me, resignation written in the slumping line of his shoulders, his mouth.

“You’re sure nothing like this has happened before?” he said. “Maybe at school?” I wasn’t looking at him anymore, though. When I answered, I spoke to Mami.

“Never,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Mami nodded, still without meeting my eye, and her fists unclenched. I took a step toward her but she crossed her arms and looked away. I stumbled, swaying on the spot. I looked to Papa, who was eyeing the seedling where it lay in the dust.

“It’s time to leave,” Mami said to Papa. She turned her back and began to walk across the mountainside to the path. When she was out of earshot, Papa retrieved the seedling. He pressed it into my hands.

“Keep it hidden,” he said.

“I don’t want it,” I insisted.

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“You will later,” he said. “Take it.”

He turned and followed Mami. For a moment, I considered throwing the seed in the dust. I walked over to the hollow of the tree, set it among the others and began to follow Mami and Papa, but I’d taken no more than two or three steps before I turned back to retrieve it, tucking it inside my tunic.

We walked down to the car and climbed in without speaking. Mami ignored me. Her eyes were closed, her forehead resting on the window casing.

As we drove away, the seed pulsed against me like an auxiliary heart.

* * *

The light in the hold blurs and slithers away from me, and with it the immediacy of the memory I’ve stored inside the seed. Before it fades completely, I reach out for the remnants of the golden light, grasping a thick strand and twining it through my fingers. I glance around. Everyone is sleeping and, unless they’re looking closely, they won’t see what happens next. I bring the handful of light to my mouth and breathe in, drawing it down into my lungs, feeling its warmth relaxing the muscles and viscera as it goes. I bring the image of a white-throated warbler to mind. It was Papa’s favourite bird – he’d painted a little scene of birds for me on my tenth birthday, and joked about how I wasn’t to bring these ones to life. Mami hadn’t laughed.

I push this thought away and concentrate on the striped markings Papa had painted on the warbler’s head, the puff of grey down on its chest, its beak slightly ajar beneath its opaque eyes. As I exhale, a bird made of golden light zips across the hold and flits among the shadows. I extend my hand and it spirals towards me, its wings pressed against its body and head outstretched. It brushes past me, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. At last it comes to settle on the first two fingers of my proffered hand.

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It opens its mouth as though calling to a mate, but I can’t hear anything. Papa couldn’t paint its music. I stroke its head, feel its heart thrumming against my thumb, its feet biting into the flesh of my hand.

“Warble warble,” I whisper, bringing the bird closer to my face. “Won’t you sing for me, little bird?”

The bird stares back, but not at me. Through me. It cocks its head, turns around on its perch and bursts into flight so abruptly it startles me. It passes through the window, shattering into honey-coloured drops that trickle down the glass, leaving me alone in the hold.

The remaining light fades, and things solidify around me again. The shifting bodies and the low murmurs of the other passengers are even more oppressive than before. I place my hand against the window but I feel nothing – no warmth, no trace of the bird. Mami’s snores intensify as she rolls onto her back, corralling me in a space too small to lie down in. I slump against the curve of the hold, folding my legs beneath me. Out the window, the light is just light, casting vague shadows against the glass.

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USRA

Nights are long in the hold. I drift in and out of sleep and wake more exhausted with each day. As we cross the sea, I think of what we are leaving behind. I wonder, most of all, what will happen if we ever go back. Will the Hand throw us in prison? Will they discover Ada for what she is? Will we all be executed, and have our pictures printed in the traitor columns of the Thierran newspaper?

When I was fourteen – the same age as Ada – I had a friend at school named Nasli. Her elantry came to her at the same time as puberty, but she’d been more afraid of her first blood than of her magic. Her mother was an elantir and she had hoped to be one, too. The mother was a healer, but with no need of medicines. She could hold her patient’s hand and sense what was wrong with them. She said she could heal them from the inside out. People travelled from far away to visit her healing houses, and Nasli inherited her gift.

Nasli and I finished school together, but then I went to study astronomy at the college and she began to work in her mother’s healing house, and we saw each other only rarely, at the markets or the temple. After the water feuds, I went to the healing house and found it burned out, the roof collapsed. Anything left had been destroyed or looted. Nasli and her mother were both gone. I asked the neighbours what had happened but none of them would speak to me and I knew they’d been taken by the Hand.

Ada’s abilities emerged much earlier than Nasli’s. She was little more than a baby when she started making paper animals walk across the kitchen table and drawing little stars that winkled on the page. Pitr called these Ada’s little miracles, but I told him not to encourage her. They were curses, not miracles, I said, and we needed to quash those abilities in order to protect our daughter.

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I think my ferocity frightened him but I stood by my words. I never told him about Nasli – there was plenty of other evidence of the dangers Ada would face if we let it go too far. The elantar were Thierran slaves, forced to reap again and again, kept in chains in the prison under the energy compound and tortured until they were mad, or so the rumours went. Pitr and I once saw a woman snatched by the Hand from her stall at the markets. She saw them coming and tried to run but they brought her down in a cascade of lemons and beat her so fiercely the juice ran pink and brown down the grocers’ row when they dragged her away. She was an elantir, went the whispers. Her brother turned her in for water stamps.

So we scolded Ada every time she performed one of her miracles. I even struck her one night when I went into her room and saw she had managed to arrange all the flames from the wicks of the candles in a corona hovering above her head. Pitr, perhaps, would have been charmed by such tricks but not me, and I hit her on the backs of the legs with the broom handle until she cried. When Pitr came home, neither of us said anything.

Yes, I admit it. I wanted to make Ada ashamed of her elantry, to hate it so much she would bury it so deeply inside herself that it would never emerge again. I thought I’d succeeded. After that beating, she never demonstrated any other special abilities, and she soon forgot all about it. I don’t think she remembered, even on her ninth birthday when we took the trip to the old forest, what she had done as a baby.

Pitr and I worried, after the incident with the seed, that we wouldn’t be able to keep her elantry hidden anymore. We redoubled our previous efforts, only letting Ada leave the apartment to go to school, never allowing her to bring friends to the house or permitting her to visit theirs. On the rare occasions we received visitors, I bade her to stay in her room and we told our guests she was out, or ill. Of course, this meant she had no friends in the end, and Pitr asked me again and again if we were doing the right

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thing, but I was adamant. It was for her own good. I didn’t trust anyone. The slightest incident and we could lose her.

In secret, I tried to find out what kind of elantry she possessed. It didn’t match any other kind of elantry I’d ever heard of. I tried to hunt down books or papers on the elantric principles, but I couldn’t find any information without risking being discovered by the Hand. Ada’s magic did not fit into the old categories I’d studied at school when I was her age – elantar who worked with wind or water, elantar like Nasli who healed, elantar who could make plants grow and, of course, elantar who were artists. Pitr reminded me often, in those days, about the elantric artists. As a boy, his mother would leave him in the artists’ square at the market while she did her shopping so he could see the sculptures that constantly morphed shape and texture. He’d loved them so much he’d wanted to become an artist and had been disappointed to learn that elantry cannot be learned, and that he did not have the innate ability.

Did he think those stories would convince me of the beauty or the value of elantry? No. It did the opposite, in fact. If the Hand would take even a lowly Kalani painter whose only talent was making stick figures dance to amuse children at the markets, why not my daughter, too?

I don’t blame Ada. I’m not as cruel or blind as that. But, I admit, I am afraid of her. Of what she might be capable of. I hate elantry. I hate her elantry. But I don’t hate her. No, I could never hate Ada. Is that what she thinks? Oh god. I hope not.

The sun is coming up. Soon it will be time to rise. My body feels heavy, like bags of sand. Ada is curled awkwardly on her side, her mouth ajar, a gentle rumble coming from her throat.

No, this isn’t Ada’s fault. I hope she understands.

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ADA

Three days, Orgol says, and we’ll strike land. Three or four. Five. Five. Six at most.

He’s never travelled this far east before. The ship is still heavy with passengers, although we’re drinking our way through the water faster than anyone would like. She’s slow, and there’s a headwind. Orgol cuts our rations in half so there’s only a half-cup of rice a day and sometimes I can’t distract myself from the gnawing hunger and have to hold my tummy and try not to cry like the infants. We pray for rain so at least we’ll be able to refill the water stores, but the skies are stubbornly clear.

After thirty-five days on board the ship, everyone is thin, weak and hungry. Things seem to tighten on board the skyship, our despair swelling within its parameters so it seems smaller than before. Everyone is irritable. The little children cry all day and their mothers can no longer bring themselves to comfort them. Something violent pulses beneath the surface of things, and people quarrel over their rations, their belongings, their space. Men fall to fisticuffs and are pulled apart by the crew and lashed. One morning, Orgol catches Haydar and the other sackball boys pilfering from the stores. He ties them all to the missenmast and gathers us round to watch the whipping – five lashes each on their thin, pimpled backs. He makes us form two rows on the port side and herds them through this tunnel, urging us to strike them with our fists. If he catches anyone slacking off, he threatens to whip them, too, so Mami and I slap and kick the boys as they pass, just like everyone else. Some of the passengers seem to relish this task, their blows raining down and causing the boys to cry out, to stumble to their knees and crawl. When the boys have traversed the tunnel, the captain locks them in a cage in the fo’c’s’le for two days without food or water. We hear them crying at night while the crew stamp their feet and shout at them to stop their racket, but no one speaks of them. I cover my ears so I can’t hear them while I’m trying to sleep, and eventually they lose

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their voices and I can only hear the faintest barking from them, now and then, when the wind drops. They emerge almost delirious, stained in their own waste, their skin pale and puckered, their eyes narrowed against the assault of daylight. I watch them crawl back to their parents on hands and knees, the cuts oozing yellow through the scabs and sticking to their torn shirts, which cling to them like a flaking chrysalis.

Even though we’re getting closer to Maradek, the hours stretch out infinitely with nothing to mark our progress, just the flat expanse of the ocean, the unending curve of the sky. There are more funerals. A woman travelling by herself. An older couple – the man first, and then his wife less than a day later. We are too high above the sea to hear their bodies strike the water, but we see the white plume of them and then they disappear, swallowed whole. Mami keeps count of the dead. Thirteen, she tells me after the woman is thrown overboard. Fourteen, the morning the wife does not wake.

Mami is more possessive of me than ever. She sleeps tangled up in me, her breath hot at my ear, my neck. I fret at this confinement and yearn to be alone. I know this is only Mami’s way of trying to keep me safe and that I shouldn’t resent her, but I do. At other times she seems set on punishing me for something. She cuts my hair one day with a pair of dull sewing scissors borrowed from Nisa. I scratch and claw at her, determined not to lose my thick curls, filthy as they are. She bats my arms away and pins me to her breast.

“There’s been an outbreak of lice,” she explains, wrenching a fistful of my hair into the right position, making my scalp smart. “All the women are doing it. As soon as I’ve done yours, you can help me with mine.”

“Who has lice?” I ask. But she doesn’t answer me. I can see other women walking the deck but they still have their hair. I try to break free but she is stronger than me and pins me against her with vice-like fingers. I sit,

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sullen and silent, while she snips off curl after curl. I rake through the offcuts with my fingers, holding back tears.

“Stop crying,” she says. “No one else is crying about something as small as this. Would you rather get lice?”

I say nothing.

“It grows back, you know.”

After she’s finished, she flings the hair overboard and the strands are whipped away on the wind. She hands me the scissors and turns her back to me, waiting for me to begin work on her own hair, but I throw them down and walk to my usual spot at the bow, my shoulders hunched against her, the air cold on my fresh scalp. She doesn’t follow.

I keep an eye on Lahle, although she doesn’t approach me again. I observe the ease with which she mixes with the other passengers. Somehow she even makes Haydar laugh. I wondered why she approached me. Should I seek her out? Strike up a conversation? But how? I wonder how friendships begin. I’ve had no practice. Old Mrs Maro was the closest thing I had to a friend in Kalan. I keep watching Lahle, trying to find the right time. But then we get in a fight.

It’s Lahle’s fault. She starts stealing things. I’m the only one who notices, because I’m watching her every day. It’s only little things, at first – buttons, needles, hairpins – things people hardly miss, if at all. But then she grows bolder and they begin to notice. She takes a child’s doll, even though the child cries and cries at night, and the mother searches helplessly for it while people scream at her to shut the brat up. Then she takes a crystal amulet a man kisses before saying his prayers every night. I’m wondering whether to say something, and to whom, when Lahle steals from me. I catch her late one afternoon, after clambering down into the hold to retrieve a volume of Kalani folk stories Mami wants. I’m picking

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my way through the mire of bedrolls, packs and blankets, my eyes adjusting to the gloom, when I see her, crouching next to my bag, my pouch open and the seed in her hands.

I’m so furious that I don’t think about what I’m doing. I run at her, tackle her, and punch every inch of her I can reach. She throws me off with a shout. I hurl myself back towards her and my fist hits her face and I feel the crunch of cartilage under my knuckles. Her nose spouts blood and I shriek in triumph.

Our shouting brings the other passengers from above decks, including Mami. I’ve crammed the seed back in its pouch and hold it in my left hand while I thump Lahle in the ribs with the right. Her father seizes me and throws me back and I sprawl on the floor, winded. Mami flings herself at Ediz and she starts fighting like I’ve never seen before, teeth bared, small hands and feet flying. Emre is there, then, trying to prise her off Ediz, while Lahle crawls from the fight, red dripping from her nose and lip. More adults come to the fray, and I think at first they’re going to intervene, to restore order, but they’re joining in. They want to fight. The wet, smacking sound of body on body, the grunts of pain through grinding teeth, make me feel sick. Nisa skirts the fight and comes over to crouch next to me.

“Are you hurt?” she asks. I shake my head. She shouts at everyone to stop but they either can’t hear her or don’t want to.

Then Orgol and the rest of the crew are there, their bodies casting long shadows on us from above. Ridvan descends with the whip and lashes whoever’s in his way. Soon we’re quiet, creeping back to our spots in the hold. But Orgol isn’t going to let it go.

“Who started this?” he asks everyone gathered, and they all look at me and Lahle. Orgol seizes Lahle by the arm and Ridvan gets me by the hair even though Mami and Ediz are shouting at him to let us go. He ignores them

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and drags us up on deck. The hatch is slammed shut and, although it’s early and we’ve eaten nothing, everyone is locked in and I hear their protests turn into fresh accusations against Ediz and Mami.

Lahle and I are dragged to the cage in the fo’c’s’le and thrown in. I suppose we’re lucky not to be whipped, but it’s bad enough to lie in the crusted waste of its former prisoners. Twisted nails stick up through the floor and catch my clothing, rake at my skin. There’s not enough room to lie down or stand up, so we sit, hunched, our necks and backs aching, assessing our wounds and doing our best to ignore each other. Of course, Lahle is the first to speak.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her words are muffled by the fresh break in her nose, but she doesn’t complain. I know I should feel bad but I don’t.

The silence is heavy and seems to stifle us. Lahle shifts back and forth, her body grazing mine each time, and there’s no way to shirk her.

“Stop fidgeting,” I say.

“I really am sorry,” she says, hugging her knees to her chest. “It’s just – well, I was curious about that seed. It’s beautiful. Please, where did you find it?”

There’s a thin veneer of light, reticulated through the cage and the boards above, by which I can see, dimly. Her eyes gleam as she studies my face, her lips parted softly in a way that reminds me, somehow, of Papa when he’s concentrating on a painting, and I soften.

I get out the seed and show it to her. She holds it close and inspects it, turning it round and round as though looking for some key that will open it and spill its secrets. I start to get frustrated and hold out my hand for her to give it back. When she doesn’t, I reach out to snatch it away from her. Our fingers touch.

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The hold shrinks and for a moment I can’t breathe. Something passes between us – no, something is cleared away, like a veil lifting. What is that? There’s too much light. It seems to pour from my eyes, engulfing both of us, and we disperse on the photons, garbled, ricocheting off each other like messages drifting through space.

We bleed together, rushing and throbbing through a conjoined network of veins and arteries. I feel a drumming in my chest, off-beat and half-time, the percussive conduction of some shared heart, like pulsations of light that emanate outwards. I – we – attempt to part, and the drumming slows. How to breathe? Mouth/s open, gulping; for a moment the two of us are not quite one, but we are not ourselves either, like images layered on top of each other so that something hidden is revealed, when apart they did not make sense.

And then air floods my deflated chest and I reel, my hands going to my chest, my stomach, grasping at myself. Lahle is open-mouthed, her hand pressed to her throat. The seed spins onto the floor between us. When I’ve caught my breath, I seize Lahle by the collar and she grabs my wrist, her eyes wet with fear.

“You’re an elantir.”

The same words at the same time, her voice a touch lower than mine, but the harmony is clear. For a moment I’m afraid, and then I let that fear slip away, and I can see the hollows of her cheeks where she’s smiling, reaching out for me.

“You’re – ”

“ – like me.”

The shock of it, the pleasure, the terror.

The hope.

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I’ve never felt this way with anyone before. There’s a sudden intimacy, physical and intense – an awareness of her breathing, the warmth of her skin, the throb of the pulse at her neck. I feel her weight like a magnetic force, pulling us together. Lahle must feel it too – she leans in towards me, her skin touches mine and gives me a shock. It seems impossible to repel her, even if I had wanted to; she’s already a part of me, lodged inside like an extra rib.

“What was that?” Lahle asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “A connection.”

It had felt the same way when I’d made the seed grow, as though I was being pulled apart from the inside out by light. I had felt a hint of it, I realised, in the weight of the elantar I’d seen at the docks. The compulsion to approach them, so strong it was almost a gravitational field.

“I’ve never met another elantir,” I say. “Have you?”

Lahle stiffens. I feel her tension in my own shoulders, my own belly.

“My mother,” she says. She wraps her arms around her knees and rests her chin on top. “She was an elantir. She was taken by the Hand during the protests I told you about in Minkara.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“My father wanted to go to Kalan to find her,” she says, “but Uncle Emre talked him out of it. He said I’d be discovered and we’d all be arrested.”

For a moment I see the rows of elantar at the docks again, so still beneath their hoods. Her mother could’ve been one of them. Lahle must be thinking the same thing – imagining her mother as a slave, chained hand to foot, spat upon in the streets, kept in darkness and tortured by the Hand.

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“Your uncle was right,” I say. “Emre was the one who found out about this ship. He said we had to leave before the Hand came for me.”

I reach out, put my hand on her shoulder. The gesture doesn’t feel as awkward as I thought it would, and I’m glad when Lahle turns to face me.

“Is that why you left?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, “at least partly. But my father really is an artist in Maradek. We were worried we’d never see him again after the Thierrans announced the trade sanctions. We had to leave in case he couldn’t come home.”

“Do you think it’s really as they say?” she asks. “All that water? All that green?”

“Maybe.”

“I dream about it sometimes,” Lahle says. “I’m standing in the rain, drinking it all up, but then it begins to flood and I end up drowning in it. What do you think that means?”

“I don’t know,” I reply. “Maybe you’re afraid that things won’t be how you imagine.”

“But they can’t be, can they?”

“No,” I say. “I suppose whatever’s waiting for us, it won’t be anything like our dreams. Papa says it’s important to hope, anyway. He says that’s the purpose of art – to imagine. Imagine if things were different, he says. If you can do that, you know there’s still hope.”

“Is your Papa an optimist?”

I laugh. “Yes, that’s what Mami always says. She can’t stand it sometimes.”

“He sounds a lot like my mother. She used to say that hope makes us human.”

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“Papa would like that,” I say. “You’ll have to tell him.”

We fall silent for a long time. I’m suddenly exhausted. I can barely make out Lahle’s face in the gloom anymore – outside, it must be nearly evening.

“It feels like everything is a mistake sometimes, doesn’t it?” ventures Lahle.

“All the time,” I say. “But we have to see it through. That’s the worst part. There’s no going back.”

“No, there’s no going back now.”

She reaches out and grazes my hand with the back of hers and I close my fingers around it for a moment. Her skin is cold even though it’s warm and airless in the fo’c’s’le.

“Ok,” she says, still holding her hand. “Enough serious stuff. You have to tell me about your elantric ability.”

“You first,” I insist.

“All right,” she says. She straightens her back and tightens her grip on my hand. I try to pull away but she won’t let go.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Showing you,” she says.

“All right,” I say, and then, childishly, “It won’t hurt, will it?”

“Of course not,” she says. Her hands are steady, her eyes fixed on mine. “I can make people see things when I touch them. Things I remember. Things I imagine. My mother had a similar ability.”

She reaches out for my other hand and laces our fingers together. “I’m going to show you a memory.”

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Her eyes are closed now and I wonder if I should close mine too. “Relax,” she says. I’m not sure if she’s talking to herself or to me.

It’s not light but shadow that descends around us, like a cloud of smoke that soaks into my skin. The darkness fills me, fills the fo’c’s’le, until everything is black, blacker than Papa’s oil blacks, so I can’t see my own hands, or Lahle’s. I feel as though I’ve been disassembled, my mind floating through nothingness.

A dim light appears. I can’t tell how far away it is. As it brightens, I see four squares illuminated, and realise they’re window panes. Beside me a child sits on her bed. It’s Lahle, maybe six or seven, in a yellow night gown.

“It’s past your bedtime,” says a voice, and Lahle’s mother settles beside her. They have the same narrow nose, the same full lower lip, the same square chin.

Lahle’s mother tucks her in for the night and kisses her, but she doesn’t yet draw the curtains. It’s a bright night out the window and Lahle doesn’t want to sleep.

“Would you like a bedtime story?” Lahle’s mother asks, and the child Lahle nods so vigorously her hair flops into her eyes. Lahle’s mother pushes it back with a smile that crinkles.

“Well,” she says, “where do you want to go tonight?”

“The sea, the sea!”

“The sea,” she says, and nestles closer to Lahle, her arms around her, her chin nestled in tight to her neck, below the ear. “Why is it always the sea, Lahle?”

“It’s wet,” she says. “And big.”

“Yes,” Lahle’s mother laughs. “It is. All right, let’s visit the sea.”

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She takes Lahle’s hands, and the moon out the window vanishes, as though pulled off a stage. The panels turn into a shadow theatre of rolling waves, of strange creatures dwelling in underwater caves, of treasures that lie in sunken ships, protected by the skeletons of pirates and their death curses. Lahle shouts and thrusts an imaginary sword into invisible enemies as she watches the duels between the pirate clans.

“Are you sleepy yet?” Lahle’s mother says. But the answer is always no, and now there are new things dancing by the window. A mermaid falls in love with a star and at night she writes serenades to its brilliance in the shush- shush of the water on the shore. She watches the first flight of a starling as it follows its mother up into the great blue and wheels above the waves, learning the migratory routes of its ancestors.

“Are you sleepy yet?” Lahle’s mother says.

“No, no, no,” insists Lahle. “Again, again, show me more.”

“Why don’t you show me something instead?”

Lahle sits up and shows her mother another world in the moonlit window – the world she dreams of at night, where people live in clouds that drift above the ocean. They tie ribbons around their waists from which to anchor their dreams, which they exchange with others, and they live with all the members of their family in houses like great branching trees built in the clouds. Their songs are their histories and they bury their ideas in gardens. After it rains the ideas bloom and they’re plucked from their beds, smelling like atmosphere.

Lahle grows sleepy and she slumps into the curve of her mother’s belly, her eyes drooping. The darkness descends and I’m bodiless for a moment, a mind wandering on its own. Then it’s light again and I can feel Lahle’s hands in mine, the hot pulse of her wrist where my fingers wrap around it. We’re back in the fo’c’s’le, together.

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Lahle looks at me warily. I doubt she’s ever shown anyone except her mother this ability before. So I reach out, pluck the light from within the deepening evening shadow and weave it through my fingers.

“Watch,” I say. I breathe in the light, hold it there and then exhale it into a miniature moving world of clouds, each with its own cloud-house, trailing ribbons of dreams. It hovers between us, and when she reaches out to touch it with her fingers, it shatters into golden stars that drop into her lap and dissipate.

We don’t need to say anything. What we’ve seen, what we’ve shown each other, is enough. I tuck my pouch back under my tunic with the seed safe inside and we sit back to back, our knees drawn up in front of us like two book-ends.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” I say, and Lahle laughs.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m sorry I took your seed.”

“Promise me you’ll show me more tomorrow,” I say.

“Yes,” she replies. “Of course. We’re friends now, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I say. “Friends.”

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USRA

In my first night without Ada in almost four weeks I can’t sleep. How long will they keep her in that terrible cage? Three days, like the boys? What if she dies in there? Will they throw her body into the sea? Surely I would die too, and then I’d be sent flying into the blue with no one to hear my body break on the waves.

Is it wrong that there is a certain peace in such thoughts? Is it wrong that I yearn to fly?

I distract myself by thinking of the night before Pitr left. We climbed up onto the roof of our apartment building, and from there onto the tin roofs of the laundry, where we had a good view. We could see the temple, although the green marble dome was faded and cracked, and the statues that once stood at the four points of each cupola had been taken by the Hand to decorate the Thierran lords’ compound years ago. The bases were now nesting places for the city’s scavenger-birds, and an earthquake had caused the outer walls to fracture and slip so the whole temple seemed to slump to the left. When I was a student I’d often watched the stars from those towers. They’d offered good views of the north-east skies.

We spread a blanket and lay on our backs, looking up at the moon. It was after curfew. There were no elantric lights on, except for in the energy compound, its arched palisades glowing with light and the signals on the energy towers glinting. Dim candles flickered in the windows of the apartments across from us. The moon was a shard of brilliant silver in the sky and the stars were bright despite the shroud of dust and smog. I helped Ada define the constellation of Balik.

“Those smelly fish you say are Balik,” said Pitr, “always look more to me like bouncing rocks.”

Ada ignored his teasing.

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“For an artist,” I replied, “you have a very limited imagination.”

We had agreed, Pitr and I, that we wouldn’t talk of the departure in case we upset Ada. But as we lay there looking at the stars I knew it was heavy on everyone’s minds. I struggled to find a way to break the tension. Some story that would make things easier. Not a parable – this wasn’t the time. Just a few words, or an image, that would put Ada in a lighter mood.

“Have I ever told you,” I said, “of Nura’s sister, Volta?”

Ada was lying between Pitr and me. Our shoulders touched as she turned towards me.

“No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of her.”

“Few have,” I said. “As the goddess of the sun, Nura receives far more praise and offerings than her sister. But that isn’t Volta’s way.”

“A woman who doesn’t want praise?” said Pitr, ribbing Ada. “Do such creatures really exist?”

She pretended to throttle him with both hands as Pitr laughed.

“Go on, Mami,” she said, settling back into her position. “Papa will behave from now on.”

I propped myself up on my elbow. Pitr’s eyes were closed. He always loved my stories. He once told me it was one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with me.

“This is the story of Volta and how she came to possess the dreaming light,” I said. “By necessity, it is also the story of Nura, for the sisters are twins and their stories intertwine throughout the ages. In fact, in some stories they are the same woman. The waking woman and the sleeping woman, or the living woman and the dead woman. But there is not time enough now to go into those stories.

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“This one starts when the earth was a newborn and was constantly being struck by space rocks. Every time a rock struck ground, a new life emerged. That’s how life began to grow and flourish. The sisters were born in one of these impacts – one on the dark side of the earth and the other on the light. They rose from the craters left by the comets, which were two halves of the very same rock. While Nura cloaked herself in the light of the north, Volta swallowed the darkness of the south.

“Possessing a strong desire to explore, both sisters began to walk the earth, bringing light and darkness wherever they went, nourishing the earth in turn. Everywhere they went they found the signs of the other – words and symbols carved into mountains, footsteps on riverbeds and so on. They learned each other’s names from the birds’ songs, but they never met – they always seemed a day ahead or behind each other.

“One evening, walking along in pursuit of her sister, Volta came across a cave where she sensed a deep magic. She burrowed her way inside and came to an underground lake where there were many strange creatures she’d seen before. A fish with four legs crawled out of the water with a stone in its mouth from the bottom of the lake. To Volta’s surprise, it told her that the stone was a way-stone and would help her find her sister, whom he’d seen passing by mere hours ago. Volta accepted the stone, which glowed with a reddish light, and though she was afraid she desperately wanted to find Nura. She opened her mouth and placed it under her tongue just as the walking-fish had told her but no sooner had she done this than she collapsed on the floor of the cave and fell into a deep sleep. The walking-fish was Katu, god of chaos, in disguise. Jealous of the sisters’ beauty and renown, he was determined to destroy them if he could.

“But Katu didn’t foresee the power of the stone or what would come next. In her dreams, Nura was able to leave her body in the cave and soar freely above the earth. During her sleep-flight she found her sister following a

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great river, cloaked in day. She tried to reach out to her but as a dream- spirit she was invisible. She realised she had to wait until her sister, too, was sleeping. Yet as the sister of darkness was not walking the earth above, night did not come and with the bright sun engulfing the earth unceasingly for weeks, the seas dwindled and plants died and a terrible drought took hold. Nura didn’t know what to do. She feared the absence of night meant her sister was dead. Fruitlessly, she searched for Volta until she was so exhausted she fell into restless sleep at the foot of a mountain. It was only then that she sensed her sister’s presence beside her and embraced her in the dream-state, weeping with joy.

“Volta told her sister what the evil Katu had done and shared her worry that she would never wake up and night would never visit the earth again to soothe and replenish the overripe earth. But Nura had an idea: they would find Katu and force him to reveal the stone’s secret. That way, they could use it against him. The two sisters journeyed back to the cave, Nura in the living world, Volta in the dream-world. Nura found Katu in his true- form – a wraith-like, hunched creature with blazing red eyes – on top of her sleeping sister, rutting like a pig. She snuck up on him and threw him off, pinning him to the ground. Seared by the burning light surrounding Nura, he submitted to her interrogation and admitted that as long as the stone lay beneath Volta’s tongue she would remain in the sleep-state, unable to bring night to the world. She removed the stone and when Volta woke together they forced the stone into Katu’s mouth and dropped him into the lake.

“Volta sensed new life growing inside her and could not bear to bring forth Katu’s children, yet neither could she kill them in her womb. She gave birth to them in the cave with Nura beside her. They looked like their mother, very pale, shrouded in darkness, but with blazing eyes like Katu’s. But there was no malice in the children and their mother trained them well. She said that in order for the earth to heal, night would not be enough

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– it needed to dream. They were charged with distributing the moonstones from the bottom of the lake across the earth, sowing the dream-seeds that would grant all living things the energy they needed to survive and grow. Once the children were old enough to accomplish this task, the sisters knew it was time to depart. The world above urgently needed both day and night.

“They embraced without words but with many tears. Volta set out first with the children, carrying the stones they had fetched from the bottom of the lake, bringing dreams to all who slept in her gentle embrace. Nura followed later and found that Volta’s dreams had nourished the world and the light she bestowed upon it was returned to her two- and three-fold, ensuring great prosperity and vitality for all things.

“Though the sisters are condemned to never meet in real life, they find each other in dreams. When the moon is full and red, the sisters convene in the dreaming-world and plot revenge against Katu, who is constantly attempting to capture the children and harm the sisters. So though Nura is the more famous and revered of the two, Volta deserves equal honour and wields tremendous power – the dreaming-power that preserves waking life.”

There was a long silence after the story finished. All of us were looking up at the moon. We talked about our dreams and whether we remembered them. I t0ld Ada that I rarely remember mine but suspected that they stayed somewhere deep down inside me, where they were untouchable. Ada liked that. She said she believed it too.

As I lie in the hold, I wonder if I still believe in the power of dreams. I remember all my dreams these days, though. They’re all of drowning in a black sea, of being smothered by dead bodies, or of watching Ada’s corpse being tossed overboard, the sheet falling away from her face so I can see her mouth open in a silent scream.

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Yes, I still believe in dreams. Why else would I feel this way? The darkness of those dreams, nested so deep inside me, is swallowing me from the inside out. I know it. It’s the dreams that won’t let me be.

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ADA

Mami seems ill the day after the fight when Orgol releases Lahle and I from the cage in the fo’c’s’le. She doesn’t eat. When she holds me at night, her arms are limp and clammy, and when I press her to talk, she shakes her head, her eyes dull and her lips pursed so tightly they disappear.

“Tell me a story,” I whisper into her ear. “Anything.”

She begins to speak, but her voice is flat and her eyes unfocused.

“A tree is forced to drop all its leaves and branches to survive, and it wastes away, down to the roots, and is no longer a tree,” she says. Her usually lively hands remain still in her lap. “Then a man dies in war, his wife and children starve, and they have no money to offer prayers to Nura at temple so they can’t find each other in the afterlife. The next day, a bird is born without wings and its brothers and sisters grow up and fly away, leaving it alone forever.”

I can’t make any sense of this. Her voice trails off and then she lies down to sleep without finishing. She would never have allowed a story to end so unsatisfactorily in Kalan. The next night, I try to ask questions that would have interested her at home – questions about the stars.

“What’s that constellation?” I ask, pointing at Kral.

“I don’t know,” she murmurs, not even bothering to turn her head. “It means nothing. It’s all just dust.”

“But what about cosmic inflation?” I say. “Explain stellar parallax to me, Mami. What is the relation between the radial velocity and proper motion of a star?”

I pepper her with questions, hoping one of them will spur her to answer me. At last she turns to face me, but again, I get the sense she is talking to herself more than me.

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“Do you know where all this trouble comes from?” she says. I shake my head. “In closed systems, things tend from a state of order to a state of disorder. There is always a measure of loss. A deterioration. And we never touch, have you noticed that? Things can never connect directly because of the magnetic propulsion principle. So people are separated forever, even when they appear to be face to face, hand in hand.”

I don’t know what she means. She is holding me in her arms, isn’t she? She is squeezing me so tightly I think I might suffocate.

I try to cheer her up by talking about what it’ll be like when we see Papa again. How we’ll finally be safe. She listens to me read the letters, but if I speculate on the art Papa might be working on in Maradek she becomes angry and pushes me away. I don’t know what to do. She’s so thin and pale. Only halfway here.

* * *

I spend more and more time with Lahle. Two days after the fight, we sit together at the skyship’s bowsprit, watching the water and reading each other’s books. Lahle is interested in Mami’s volume of Kalani myths, and I’m interested in her uncle’s poetry books. Lahle has begun to teach me some elantric principles her mother taught her, but I’m slow to grasp them.

“Every elantir has a particular talent,” she says. “I can show people images. You can store memories in objects and manipulate light.”

I hadn’t yet shown Lahle the memory in the seed, but I had told her about it. Her eyes had widened at my description and she’d begged me to demonstrate my ability, but I’d refused. I’d felt Mami’s eyes on me, the dull, glassy gaze tracking my movements. She didn’t like Lahle – she blamed her for the fight – and I didn’t want to get caught practising elantry.

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Lahle shifts positions so we can both keep an eye out for people who might be able to hear our conversation. We don’t want to be discovered. Even though we’ve left Kalan, we don’t trust anyone to treat us kindly if they know what we are.

“Whatever the elantric talent, the principles are the same,” says Lahle. “All rely on ruh – the lifeblood of living things. Trees, animals, whole ecosystems. Everything. My mother always said energy is exchanged, not created, and that’s the principle every elantir must live by. The elantir offers a piece of their own ruh in exchange for that which they take. In time, the ruh regenerates but an elantir must be careful not to take too much, in case they also give more than they can afford.”

“But not in the Reaping Invocation,” I say. “That’s different.” Lahle has explained this to me before but I’m only just beginning to understand it.

“Exactly,” she says. “Elantar use an Invocation to perform a Reaping. The Invocation is an oral form that transforms ruh into baseload energy that can be stored in a battery or the power grid. A spell, I suppose you could call it. There are lots of different kinds of Invocations. If they know the words, any elantir can work them. But there’s only one Reaping Invocation. And it’s the only one that isn’t an exchange of energies. It just takes and takes without ever replenishing ruh. You’ve seen what that does. Nothing will grow. People get sick. The sky burns and the earth breaks. And all the other kinds of elantry – the healing, the arts, all of it – weaken because they have so little ruh to work with. Maybe they’ll even disappear.”

I wonder if Mami and Papa know about this. Elantry must have been more common when they were my age. Perhaps they’d had friends who were elantar. But now people are afraid to talk about these things. I find myself envying Lahle and all the information her mother has given her. Then I chastise myself. She’s lost her mother. I still have mine. Who am I to blame

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Mami and Papa for not teaching me the things that cost Lahle’s mother her life?

“Do you know why there’s no elantry in Maradek?” I ask.

Lahle shakes her head. “There must be ruh,” she says. “It’s everywhere. But my mother never said anything about elantry in other places.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to practice our magic there?” I ask.

She looks uncertain. “I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll have to wait and see. If we do, we might put ourselves in danger.”

She returns to her book, but I know what she’s afraid of. I’ve spent days thinking of it myself. What if Maradek’s the same as Kalan? What if we still have to hide? What if they hate us for what we are, and then, what if –

“What if we’re sent back?” I say.

Lahle sets her book aside and rests her chin in her hands.

“Before the journey, my father asked Orgol how many other skyships have made it to Maradek,” she says. “Orgol just said, We’ll get you there. But he doesn’t know. No one’s come back. No one’s sent word.”

I’ve thought about that many times. I’ve pictured those other ships crashing and disappearing, or staggering into the Maradek harbour to an army that turns them away.

“My father says that if the Maradeki send us home the Hand will have us all executed,” says Lahle, her tone frank to cover the fear. “We’ll have broken their decree. They’ll make an example of us. The Hand will discover you and me, and they’ll make us their slaves.”

I wrap my arms around myself and try to clear my head by focusing on the horizon. There is a low bank of cloud. Perhaps it’s raining in Maradek.

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“Maybe the others made it,” I say. “Maybe we’ll have friends there.”

“Maybe.”

At the beginning of the journey, I’d pictured myself walking in the city with Papa, drinking and washing every day, eating as much as I like. But it’s harder to picture that now. I tell myself it’s the skyship – the darkness of the hold, the death on its far side. It’s hard to imagine it ever ending.

“Captain says we’ll see land in a few more days,” says Lahle.

“Yes,” I say. “We’re almost there.”

Thinking of Papa helps me survive those long, uncertain days. I picture his long, drawling face and the way the hollows of his cheeks crease when he smiles. His shrewd eyes behind their oblong spectacles, the edges of both lenses stained with milky fingerprints. His dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing the paler underside of his forearms, and the frayed leather band of his father’s wristwatch. I don’t talk about this with Lahle or Mami, but concentrating on these details is what gets me through until we finally see land, on the morning of the fortieth day of our journey – two weeks later than expected.

Lahle is the one to see it first. It’s just the faintest of lines on the horizon, grey-green instead of grey-blue, and we all rush up to the bow to look. The wind begins to pick up and by the next morning we can make out the shapes of trees, the troughs and peaks of the mountains, the long fingers of the beaches to the north, the impassable rockfaces to the south. The light has a different quality there, as though poured from above, trickling through the clouds and pooling on the surface of the ocean.

That afternoon we can make out the city, nestled between the mountains and the sea. Everyone crowds the decks and we share a pair of grimy binoculars around. I take my turn, pressing them to my face so hard they cut into my cheekbones. There is the harbour under a dome of clouds,

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bustling with watercraft. There are the elegant stone and glass towers glistening in the late afternoon light, the colourful dome of the bazaar, the minarets of the halantek – the holy house where they celebrate new art. And over there – the grand pillars at the city gates with gryphons on top, the right paw of each raised in a gesture of welcome. All as Papa described.

But it’s not the city that holds my attention. It’s the trees. They’re shocking, as though shafts of light have pierced the mountainside and burst into green flame. A great forest of them. I whisper it to myself, put the thing and the word together in my mind: forest. I thought I’d had some idea of what a forest was, but now I know the image I’d held was crude – an insult, almost. I focus on the trees, studying all the varieties, struggling to remember all the names Mami had told me. There are lissom greybarks with sage-coloured leaves in the city streets, and tall black sentinels limned with silver-grey foliage lining the harbour, and there – trees like the ones Papa says my seed comes from. Taller than all the others, and more numerous, their branches like sharp daubs of emerald sweeping across the mountainside. So many! I can’t take their measure. I’ve never seen such hues of green and brown and blue and silver before, and I yearn to walk there and breathe in that light, taste it, filtered through wood and leaf. I’ll plant my seed there, I decide. It will grow well, surrounded by so many others. It will learn to be a tree here, just as I will learn to be Maradeki.

Someone wrenches the binoculars away from me, and I blink, readjusting. The city is only a couple of miles away now. Even without the glasses I can make out the towers, the shape of the harbour. The trees cast a green-gold light over the city and I suddenly realise how cool it is. I shiver as brisk air gusts against my skin, raising goose bumps on my bare arms. Dark clouds stream overhead and the dirigible lurches, picking up speed. The crew rushes to bring in the sails, cursing as passengers stumble in and out of their paths.

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“Into the hold!” shouts Orgol, but we are slow to obey, our eyes still on the city, the mountains, the trees. The skyship skids along, moving faster than it ever has before.

“Come on,” hisses Lahle. She turns and begins to stumble back to the hold, but I don’t follow her yet.

Birds. A flock of them. Blue, dappling to silver underneath, flying to shore. I laugh as they jet overhead in a diamond pattern and spread out my arms as though I too have wings. When they swoop in close I see their beaks and wings are tipped with jet. Such beautiful birds. I don’t know their names but I’ll ask as soon as we get to the city. If this is to be my home, I must know the names of these birds.

I can hear Lahle calling me but, jostled by other passengers, I can’t see her. Lightning fractures the sky and for an instant everything looks like a painting, or the idea for a painting, the forms just being filled in, the structure defined mostly by negative space. Then there is a tremendous crash, and the lightning is so bright I’m momentarily blinded. Everything lurches to the left and I stagger, falling to my hands and knees. I hear Lahle’s voice again through the din of shrieking and cursing, and I try to pick myself up, to go to her, but I’m sliding now – tilting and tumbling end over end – and then I hit something solid and pain shatters me. I can’t even find enough breath to cry out. My hands scrabble for purchase, find a railing. I haul myself to my feet only to be flung down again, and the pain is worse this time. My ribs. My chest. I can’t stand, but I try to crawl.

Blood mingles with the first drops of rain and smears my face. I see what is happening through a pink lens. We’re falling. The mast of the dirigible has cracked and the sails are unfurling, catching the wind and dragging us off course, left and down. Falling and falling, the sea coming up to swallow us, roiling black. Down we go, the ropes and sails tangling round the mast and sending us into a spiral, faster and faster.

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I look around desperately for Mami, for Lahle, but it’s dark as night and I can’t find them. By shards of lightning I catch a glimpse of the water waiting for us, and the terrified faces of others clutching uselessly at ropes and railings.

The next lightning strike shows me the waves, like giant arms waiting to pull us down.

I shut my eyes and brace for the impact.

* * *

I sink into darkness, adrift in a sea of white noise.

Something comes into view. A window, but there is nothing visible through it, just black and white fuzz that matches the dull buzzing in my ears. Then it clears and I can see my mother. She’s standing on the roof of our apartment in Kalan, looking at the stars. She raises one arm and caresses the shape of the sickle moon. The rays fragment through her fingers and it seems as though she holds the light in her palm. She’s singing something to herself. Her voice swims up through the sea of white noise but it’s muffled and I can’t make out the words.

She turns to me, her cheeks flushed, and she sees me watching her though the screen. She smiles the special downturned smile I love. She’s holding something out for me. Something pink. Is it a flower? A ribbon? Then I see that it’s a piece of moonlight – Volta’s dreaming light. It unfurls between Mami and I like a silk scarf, passing through the window. I gather it up in great bunches and swallow it down, swallowing, swallowing, until I’m gagging on the light, and even then I keep cramming it in.

I can still see Mami through the window and I try to call out to her, but she has turned away and is looking at the moon again. I begin to choke, my fingers scrabbling at my throat. I can’t think. There’s only the vortex of my chest and shadows swooping in from the edges.

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Something pierces the darkness. A pale disc. Is it the moon? I can hear Mami’s voice, but clearly this time. She’s screaming, not singing. The darkness is whisked back like a curtain. The shadows scatter.

* * *

I surface, sucking in two huge lungfuls of air before vomiting seawater. Lanterns. Voices. Lahle has me round the shoulders but I’m thrashing so wildly she can barely hold on. She’s pulling me through the waves and now Mami’s hands are reaching for me. We embrace, sobbing seawater. Though I’m half-drowned, I burn all over.

Boats have come for us, white boats with banks of oars and a red sail at the front, rimmed with lanterns and skilfully manoeuvred by pale Maradeki men in black and red uniforms. Mami is leaning out over the edge for me. She heaves me on board with the help of one of the sailors. I can hear someone shouting, but in a language I don’t understand. Lahle scrambles in after me and sprawls on the floor of the boat, her eyes shut, gasping.

I look up and see Mami’s face, her black hair pasted to her forehead and cheeks, her eyes red from the salt water. Sitting up makes my head spin, and for a moment all I can see is a kaleidoscope of rain and white foam. I close my eyes and breathe deeply until my heart stops heaving in my chest. When I open them again my vision clears. Now I can see the dirigible on its side, each dash of the waves drawing it under. There are people in the sea – heads and arms are emerging, submerging. The Maradeki steer deftly through the terrifying conditions, plucking them out. Lahle is behind us – I can hear the breath gurgling in her waterlogged lungs.

Mami presses me to her chest and I cling to her, savouring each salty breath. Something bites into my belly. I pull away from her, my fingers searching for a wound. But then she tugs her tunic aside and shows me my pouch, tucked safely into her belt. She gives it to me and I check for the seed. It’s still there, with my statue of Nura and my ring. I clutch the pouch

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to my chest and hug Mami as tightly as I can. We hold on to each other as we pitch to and fro across the waves, heading to shore. I can just make out the shapes of the gryphons at the city gates. They seem to move in the flickering light of the storm.

We’re coming, Papa. We’ll be there soon.

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PITR’S JOURNAL

Kalan to Maradek

Tonight I’m writing from 4,000 feet above ground on board the Hullamok, somewhere between Kalan and the sea. I have beside me some maps of Maradek, a Maradeki dictionary, my invitation from the karzat and my sketchbook. The captain says we are making good time and should arrive in the city within a week. I am glad of it for I have little to do. I have few materials to work with – only some pencils and charcoals, and the paper I brought with me will soon run out – and the landscape is flat and dull, offering little inspiration. I have tried to work on some studies of the desert but the sun bleaches everything to a monotone and my hand stutters on the page as it searches for some feature to focus on. The last two days I have abandoned sketchwork altogether and instead work on a series of small sculptures in knots of timber I took from the galley fires. I have been carving angles and odd surfaces into the wood to depict the strange components of Maradeki speech. I am not sure where this work will lead but for now I enjoy exploring the limits of what can be represented in three-dimensional form.

Although Maradeki vessels come to Kalan once a month to trade – mostly water and grains – I’d never been on board one of their vessels. This ship is larger and grander than any Kalani ship I’ve seen, with a bow shaped like a roaring gryphon, polished timber decks, spacious bunks and hot meals. I met Bea, the captain, a terse man who bid me stay out of the way of the crew, and the first mate, Teza, who showed me to my bunk. As soon as the ship took flight I fell violently ill. The ship’s doctor came to visit me and gave me some tonic to drink but it tasted of anise and pepper and only made me worse. It has taken me almost a week to recover.

There are no other Kalani on the ship. The crew are polite enough but distant. The only conversation I have had is with the captain.

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“How did you come by such an offer?” Bea asked when I at last emerged from my bunk to eat in the galley. I showed him the letter from Blanka that stipulated the terms of my residency: a full wage, room and board, studio space, and a series of exhibitions. I told him I had written to Blanka at the karzat enquiring about positions and she had responded more generously than I could ever have imagined.

“I am to be the first foreign resident,” I said.

“Your art must be very great,” Bea said, “for them to offer you these terms.”

This took me aback. I sensed he did not mean it as a compliment. “Why?” I asked.

“Kalani use dark magic,” he said bluntly. “Our priests say you dishonour your ancestors and that is why your lands are dry and your skies grey.”

“Ah,” I said. “But I am no elantir.”

“Nonetheless.”

We spoke no more of the matter but I have thought often of his words in the last few days. Could my art be held in such high esteem by Blanka and the karzat? Usra had asked this very question when I first received the letter, suspicious that it was some sort of trick on the part of the Hand. But in the letter I saw the answers to all our troubles: a way free of the city that would enslave my daughter if they found out about her abilities and bleed its people for water if it came to that. The city that had burned all my art and made it impossible for me to work. A city in which nothing was possible anymore. I saw, in that letter, not only the lure of money and safety for all of us but also the promise of possibility itself.

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A leap of faith. That is what Usra called this journey. She saw this as a condemnation while I did not. Why should I deny it? Yes – that is what this is. That is why I had to go and also why she said I must not. Faith. That is what it comes down to. I was willing to fling myself into the void while she was too afraid to see what was waiting at the bottom. She has never trusted anyone but herself. She relies on herself entirely while Ada and I have always been each other’s crutch. Is it art that gives me hope? I think so. To pursue art in Maradek is also to embrace all the hope and the possibility it represents.

I could not make art any longer in Kalan. My work had been critical of the government even before the water feuds and the rise of the energy lords, but it was the Hunger series that clinched things. They were good paintings, some of my very best, ostensibly a triptych of landscapes.

The first had been a view of a gorge from the cliff’s edge, the spill of trees down to the steep swell of the river. I’d based it on a well-known oil painting of the Perde Gorge by the ruralist Berker Ceren, depicting a sun- drenched landscape, the leaves of the tall spruces dripping sunlight, and a group of Kalani explorers resting their horses on the edge of the cliffs, just beyond the tree line. I had copied Ceren’s composition, but drenched my scene in shadow, allowing only a small break in a cloying thatch of clouds that took up the entire upper third of the canvas, and the river was not clear, with the sun gilding the surface – instead, it ran red with the blood of the Yerli, the indigenous people who had been driven from the area by the explorers’ army during the settlement. Though most often I could not remember how I had begun a painting, how I had stumbled across the idea from which the work would grow, I could trace this piece back to a single line in one of my notebooks, hastily dashed across the bottom of a page of notes from a book about the Yerli that Fadel had given me: The question of why this is never told.

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The second painting in the Hunger series offered a distant view of Kalan from the mountains. I had captured the weight of the sky, the heaped regolith that lay around the city and the apertures between the hills that offered glimpses of the deserts beyond. I laid the umber oils heavily on the canvas, using my knife to carve out the pits and jags of the city, and I had sketched the lines of the trees felled during the Gleaning with charcoal, overlaid with a crimson shriek, so they seemed akin to throbbing ghosts that could not be compelled to disappear.

The third was a portrait of a young girl I had based on studies of Ada, although not a portrait in the usual sense. The figure took up only a minuscule fraction in the lower left of the landscape. She sat among the detritus of some catastrophe at the site of the city’s temple, and strewn about her were the remnants of the statues that had once adorned the balconies and cupolas, including Volta’s moon-children, identifiable by the drapery on their amputated limbs, the star medallions on their breasts and the rays upon their brows. But they were not the only ones – all around lay marble, alabaster and bronze shards – hands, feet, heads, shoulders, hips, backs, stomachs, lying in a sludge of pink and grey flesh, intestinal eruptions and blood-stained teeth, which had begun to engulf the girl. There was no sky in this picture, no horizon, and the flatness of the composition was, for me, the most important feature.

Even Usra and Ada had not seen the series before they were displayed in the Gecit Gallery as part of a group landscape show. When the show opened, everyone was stunned, and – this is not boastful but merely accurate – my work garnered more attention than all the other pieces put together, even Fadel’s. It was not surprising that the very next day the Hand came and seized the paintings and threatened to burn down the entire gallery. The very next week they rounded up all my work – even the earliest paintings I had done, which I had given to friends when I was still an apprentice – and there was a great burning in the square outside

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the energy compound, which they often used for beatings. Afterward, I was unable to exhibit at any more galleries and could find no commissions for even a lowly portrait or mural among those patrons who still had money for such things. Of course I kept working, but even I didn’t know to what end. I am not, I know, the kind of artist who can work contentedly in isolation without the need to exhibit my paintings. I am more ambitious than that – though Usra might say vainglorious – and also I believe in the necessity of others seeing my work. I believe in the transformative potential of art, including my own – its ability to act as not just mirror but also crucible.

I admit I had not thought of the consequences. Usra chided me on that count in the weeks that followed, asking how it was possible that I had not considered what would happen to myself, if not to her and Ada. Those were weeks during which vendors would not trade with us at market, our neighbours would not speak to us, Ada’s school mates teased her, and I felt the shadow of the Hand everywhere we went. We had almost no money – only the very little Usra brought in by sewing for residents of our apartment building whom she begged for work – and we had to rely on the kindness of our few friends. During those weeks, she seemed to transform from a wife into the commander of our small family. She was scathingly honest at all times and shed all unpractical ways, defining herself by the tasks that had to be done to keep us alive. Even her stories became far more didactic and I no longer found them edifying, even though Ada continued to listen keenly.

That is when I thought to write to the karzat, the renowned house of arts in Maradek, which no foreign artist had ever visited, not least a Kalani. I never expected to receive a response from Blanka offering me the position of artist-resident. I had expected Usra to be pleased but our relationship only degenerated. Usra armoured herself in a self-righteousness I found unfathomable in its inflexibility. Ada, poor thing, was afraid to take one

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side or the other and was buffeted by our arguments until she began avoiding us altogether, hiding herself in her room or visiting Mrs Maro in the apartment at the end of the hall.

The night after the letter from Blanka came, Usra would not speak to me, but only read it over and over again, getting splotches of tea on the paper. Ada was the one who broke the silence.

“What are you reading, Mami?” she asked.

Usra had glared at me by way of response, and I had had to tell Ada then, without having any time to prepare, that I was leaving to work in Maradek, that I would be able to send them money so they would not starve, and that I hoped to bring them over the sea within a year.

“So the decision has already been made?” said Usra, as Ada looked from her mother to me.

“What other choice do we have?” I asked. “I have to take this opportunity. For the family. For my art.”

“You can’t work here anymore?” said Ada.

“No. There is nothing here for us anymore. I’ll send you all the money I earn and I’ll bring you to Maradek as soon as I can.”

There was a long pause during which Usra threw the letter down on the table and Ada picked it up gingerly to skim the paragraphs.

“It’s different in Maradek,” I tried to explain. “There is no elantry there. No energy lords. There is plenty of food and water. And artists are highly respected. I will be the first Kalani artist. The first foreign artist. It’s a tremendous honour – ”

“Yes, very honourable, to leave your family – ” said Usra.

“ – for a Kalani artist – ”

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“ – just to focus on your work – ”

“ – to be invited – ”

“ – and leave us to suffer.”

“ – to develop my practice.”

Ada did not look at either of us during the exchange, but continued to read. When she was finished, Usra snatched the letter from her and waved it at me, dangerously close to the flame of the candle.

“If you think you’ll be some revered artist and treated with dignity, then you’re kidding yourself,” she said. “Why would they invite you?”

I did not know what to say. She made a good point. The Maradeki had little contact with outsiders beyond their tradeships. They rarely allowed foreigners into their city. They adhered closely to their religious beliefs, evident in their artwork, though none were privy to their scriptures. If the karzat wanted to offer a residency to an artist, why me, a lowly Kalani painter whose only major exhibition had been burned? The karzat’s reputation was extraordinary. Books and reproductions of Maradeki art were sought after, even in Kalan. The names of the great classicists were learned by all art students and their techniques analysed and imitated. They surpassed all in technical supremacy, if not in innovation.

I only realised Ada had asked me a question because her mouth was still ajar and Usra was looking at me, her eyebrows raised.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“She said, ‘What if we’re not allowed to join you in Maradek?’” said Usra. “And she’s right to be concerned. Why would they let us in? Just because of you?”

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Ada began to cry silently at her mother’s harsh tone.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Usra snapped. “She thinks you’re leaving us for good.”

“She thinks?” I said. Usra only pursed her lips in response. “We desperately need money. You remind me every day! We should take any chance we can to get out. I can’t refuse this offer. And why should I? Once I’m there I’ll send you everything I can until you can join me. And if you can’t, I’ll return.”

“Do you think the Hand will just let you come back and settle into your old life?”

“We have to try. Think of Ada.”

“Don’t you think I am?” Usra threw the letter down on the table.

“What do you think I should do? Stay here and starve?”

“You could get a job. Any job!”

“Slaughtering pigs at the pits? Running a shaw? Combing the rubbish tips for trash to sell at the markets?”

“Well, why not? If it helps us survive.”

I could only shake my head into the silence that followed. I retrieved the letter and tucked it inside my shirt before bringing out my sketchbook – a nervous habit, and a poorly timed one.

“Come on, Ada,” Usra said, thrusting herself up from the table and seizing her daughter by the elbow. “We’re distracting your father from his art.”

There were many conversations like that before I left, nearly identical. I don’t know why Usra could not accept my decision. To me, it was the only one that made sense, the only route that led to a life different to the one

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we were living. Our daughter could be taken from us. We could starve. War could break out. At any moment, everything could end.

It is Ada I think of most often on this voyage. I worry constantly about her. I wonder if she is safe. I wonder how she is getting along with Usra. She is at a difficult age. Usra acknowledges this and says it will pass. I tell myself that all is as it was when I left. The Hand knows nothing of Ada’s abilities. No – together they are as safe as if I were there with them. Safer, even.

In the end, Usra and Ada did not come with me to the docks to say their farewells. It was too painful for Usra, and Ada could not leave her mother alone. We kissed goodbye and embraced in our apartment, then they walked me down to the street and watched me ride away in the back of a shaw to the docks. I think it was for the best. I knew the Hand would be there, lurking among the stacks of shitting chickens and rotting lettuce, and I did not want to put Ada in any unnecessary danger.

I had not always agreed with Usra’s tactics in dealing with Ada’s elantry, but after that disastrous Edda I had finally begun to see things her way. I had seen the future that awaited Ada if she was discovered. I had seen it up close and it had sickened me to the point of desperation. Even now, writing about it, my hand trembles and my throat closes at the memory.

We had walked to the temple at dawn and knelt in rows on the woven mats, as was usual on Edda. As we filed into the temple, the priests had given us candles that represented the light the goddess Nura had bestowed on us. After a brief period of reflection, the head priest, Sirin, began to lead us in chorus:

Mother Nura, hear our prayers. Receive the light of our heats and the radiance of our love. This is your light, this is your love. You give us life,

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you free us from the shackles of darkness. You give us courage and steer us in the true course of faith.

And so on it went, until we felt a swell of energy in the temple. The light through the windows intensified and the candles blazed wildly. All the individual flames soared up into the air to form a great orb of light, spiked like the sun-face of Nura. We leaned forward, eagerly anticipating the climax of the ceremony. It is the one magic – the original magic, if the stories are true – we have left to enjoy.

At this point, the orb should have burst and turned to millions of specks of light that evaporated and rained down upon us. This is the traditional fulfilment of the cycle of light and the reification of Nura’s blessings.

Instead, the Hand appeared at the temple – two dozen men, armed, leading a chain gang of elantar. Sirin faltered as they surrounded him, and the light began to disperse. Too soon, the orb was not yet fully formed. He rushed to rectify his mistake, but as he did the elantar raised their hands and made synchronised slashing gestures. The room was suddenly purged of air and sound. It was as though my voice had been stolen. I could not breathe, nor move. We were all mere witnesses to what came next.

Sirin staggered and fell. His temple struck the edge of the tabernacle and he sprawled senseless on the ground. The other priests had also dropped to hands and knees and were paralysed – they could not render aid. Meanwhile, the elantar made great sweeping motions with their palms turned out to control the orb of light. One of them was speaking. Though I couldn’t hear what she was saying, her mouth moved in unfamiliar ways, and I knew, then, they were performing the Reaping Invocation, stealing our sacred light.

At some signal only they could divine, they brought their arms straight down, three parallel slashes, and thrust their fists into their palms. I felt

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the force of it in my bones as the light shattered. My vision blackened. For a moment I saw nothing and I wondered if all the light had disappeared forever. Slowly, colour crept back in. I saw a great firmament of stars and points of rainbow light receding down a dark vortex. I fell and felt my head strike the floor. When I opened my eyes, I found myself sprawled on the prayer mats, my vision dim and monochrome.

At the altar, the elantar were kneading the light into a rippling stream with the words and gestures of the invocation. They opened their arms and the light rushed into them, engulfing them in a blazing white inferno. I thought they must be destroyed by the force, the overwhelming energy of all the light, but then I noticed two of the Hand carrying an elantric cell – a large, heavy copper box with several dials, meters and a tangle of wires. A storage cell, then, but of a design I’d never seen before. The light began to dim until I could perceive the dim outlines of the elantar – their hands were placed on top of the cell as they guided the ruh they had gleaned from our offerings to Nura into the battery. Then the light vanished, and four remained upright, swaying as though drunk, while another collapsed to the floor.

The others did not aid her. Instead, a Hand stepped away from the battery and nudged her with his foot. She began to rise, sliding one hand beneath her, but she could not get to her feet. A barked command sent her scrabbling at the marble until she collapsed and took a kick to the guts. Still she did not rise, and the Hand delivered kick after kick at her belly, her head, her feet, while she stayed silent, curled in weak defence. At last another Hand spoke and her attacker stepped away.

They left, boots squealing, carrying the cell. Two of the Hand dragged the unconscious elantir by the underarms. After they had left, the priests rushed to attend Sirin, who lay motionless while blood spilled from his temple across the marble floor and uncurled towards us, soaking the

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prayer mats. I wondered at how much blood such a small, shrivelled man could hold.

I had never witnessed this kind of elantry before, though I had long suspected the theft of ruh in the form of spiritual energy was possible. It seemed logical for humans to be used as another force, the way all other resources had been used in the Gleaning. As we left the temple, I realised that such practices were, in all likelihood, already underway and had been for a long time, maybe since the beginning of the water feuds. There were the prisons. The beggars. The elantar themselves. A constant supply. I saw it laid out before me: the future. A future in which citizens were used for fuel. A future in which we would all just be batteries. No one would be safe, especially Ada.

We stumbled back towards our homes. The world was still shallow and dim to me and I was panicking. It was Usra who calmed me down, getting me to recall the amethyst blue of the sky during childhood camping trips with my father, the yellow-green of the insects that hopped in the long grasses of the plains and the glitter of copper in riverbed mica. As I called each colour to mind, the world around me slowly returned to normal.

I had become stricter, after that, in supporting Usra’s decisions to keep Ada at home whenever she was not at school. I knew she had kept the seed and I had often asked her to show it to me, before that Edda. Afterward, I stopped. But I had known things could not go on like that. It became clear that all of us – not just my daughter – had no future.

It grows dark on board the ship. Night will fall soon, and tomorrow Bea says we will catch sight of the sea. Every night before I get into my bunk I like to look at Ada’s etchings. I found them inside this journal when I opened it on board the ship. She must have slipped them in as a surprise

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before I left Kalan. They are curious things. Layers of geometric shapes and unexpected angles seem to converge but don’t, suggesting half- finished or emerging forms beneath. Of what remains unclear. These etchings have piqued my interest in mathematical properties in art. That is my current line of investigation and the basis of the work I will pursue in Maradek. I am interested to express through mathematics an aesthetic experience of space. I want to experiment with shapes and geometry and perspective – to render, for example, an equation as a three-dimensional sculpture. There is neither taste nor market for such art in Kalan, even if someone would buy one of my pieces. The emphasis is more or less on a derivative form of abstraction borrowed from more accomplished artists of another age, when it isn’t outright propaganda commissioned by one of the self-proclaimed nobility. It will be a relief to paint and sculpt in a way that is meaningful again. Already, I feel my ideas are freer out here, in this space in between what lies behind and beyond.

Maradek

What does it mean, to belong? To claim somewhere as your home, to assert a right to your existence? Here in Maradek, their word for citizen is allagolar, which, I am told, also means subject. The two are inseparable: to be a citizen is also to be subject to rules of law. I am not a citizen – citizenship can only be granted by majority agreement of the Council of the Prime – yet I am still a subject. I am still obliged to obey. Obliged. Such a term connotes gratitude as well as allegiance. Am I grateful? Yes, to a certain extent. But does this mean I owe Maradek my allegiance? My dignity? My complete and total obeisance? Am I to be their pawn, their dupe, their scapegoat?

Well.

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I arrived a week ago, on Scriving Day. The Maradeki vessel landed in the airfields just north of the city and Blanka met me there with another artist she introduced as Eszes, who is my guide. While Blanka is tall and lean, with her black hair worn in braided bunches looped about her head, Eszes is much older, with stooped shoulders and a shuffling gait. Her hair is pure white and the braids swing down her back, threaded with a blue cord that, she explained to me, signifies her rank as one of the city’s chief artists. Both wore long tunics of fine cotton – Eszes’ with a blue border of suns, Blanka’s plainer – and sandals that were quiet on the smooth, paved street. I felt filthy – I had brought only one change of clothes with me on the ship and Usra had already repaired the shirt several times before I’d torn a sleeve and lost two buttons on board the Maradeki skyship.

Together they took me through the upper reaches of the city to the karzat. The streets were almost empty – Blanka explained that on Scriving Day there is no work and all people attend the city’s temples, especially the chief temple called the halantek, for the ceremonies throughout the day and late into the night.

“What is the Scriving?” I asked.

What followed was a complicated explanation I did not fully understand, given my limited Maradeki. I grasped that there would be presentation of new art to the Maradeki ancestors, who would give certain signs, though I could not understand how. Blanka reassured me that I would soon see for myself – Eszes would be presenting a new exhibition in the evening at the halantek and I would be there for the ceremony of interpretation known as the Scriving.

The empty streets afforded me an uncluttered view of the city. I reeled about, steeping myself in the verve of colour, line and form. There are no brutal edges here. No washed out skies. No waste haemorrhaging into the

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streets. We passed houses of white stone grouped around communal gardens filled with greybarks and flowers. I saw birds I had never seen before, small coloured finches, larger silver doves and, above, the slow drift of a fierce goshawk with golden eyes. The streets were lined with trees hung with lanterns. We passed through a town square where I stopped to admire a magnificent fountain made of onyx. The water gushed from the open mouth of a carp and fell into a pond full of orange and green fish. On the other side of the square we came upon a shopping district. The doors and windows were all closed but I walked, open- mouthed, by the displays of the perfumeries and chocolateries, absintheries and brasseries, cordwaineries and haberdasheries, antiquities and nostalgeries. Blanka and Eszes pointed out things of interest as we passed: here, you can find the finest spices in the north district; here is the best place to get crushed shells for azure and turquoise paints; in here, the sweetest csokolade in the whole of Maradek.

We passed through a garden full of stone sculptures, the grass thick as moss, and walked down a thoroughfare lined with marble figures. “Here are the founding artists of the city,” said Blanka. There were many wreaths and gold ornaments laid on their brows and at their feet. “Offerings on Scriving Day,” she explained.

We came across a mother and a daughter at the end of the row who were placing woven boughs of larch on the pedestals. Eszes and Blanka called out to them in greeting and they turned and bowed low. When Blanka introduced me, they merely nodded, not meeting my eyes, and then bustled away, glancing behind them. Eszes and Blanka exchanged looks but said nothing to me, and at the time I was too dazzled by all that I saw in the city to make comment.

We climbed a set of stairs covered by a floral arbour. My fingers grazed the velveteen blooms and came away waxy and doused in pollen. At last we came out upon a stone portico that marked the northern edge of the

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city. To the left lay a set of stairs winding down to the karzat. Its four towers glistened like pure chalcedon and its vaunted dome scattered light. But, magnificent as it was, that could not hold my gaze: to the right, enormous stone and iron gates marked the border between city and forest, and beyond were the trees. I saw more greybarks, and also the red-trunks and the poplars and the spruce I had known in Kalani forests before the drought and the Reaping. There were many more I could not name. The green wave of the forest rose to meet the cerulean dome of the sky and voices of birds fell down like rain. I wanted Ada by my side then, urgently. I wanted to go into that forest with her and plant the seed. She needed to feel the mud on her hands, smell the pine and the earth, the lichen and the wildflowers.

When we arrived at the karzat, we were greeted by dozens of artists and apprentices. The artists wore grey, the apprentices green and the servants black. I was introduced to all but the names slipped from my tongue as soon as I spoke them. I could not grasp everything that was happening. It all seemed so unreal. Almost distant. As Eszes took me by the arm to take me on a tour, I saw an artist, a man of similar age to me with a beard, hurry up to Blanka and engage her in deep conversation. Their eyes followed me as I passed through the entrance hall with Eszes.

Inside the karzat, I admired the studios of glass and coruscating light while I breathed in the scents of fresh oils and clay. I rambled among the library stacks, tracking dust off cracking spines with wanderlust hands. I stumbled from wall to wall, examining the paintings, prints, tapestries and sculptures that adorned every space. At last, exhausted, Eszes took me to the room that would be mine for the rest of the year. It was too large, with a four-poster bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a view of the forest. I sat at the window, looking at the trees and thinking of Ada, until I fell asleep in the warm fingers of the sun.

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When I woke that evening, Blanka and Eszes accompanied me to the halantek to view the Scriving ceremony. Eszes had changed into a long blue dress and cloak that, she explained with an embarrassed smile, was the traditional garb for an artist honoured on Scriving Day. When we reached the halantek, Eszes was immediately besieged by people who did not spare me a glance, though they nodded or bowed to Blanka. As Eszes was swept inside and Blanka greeted those she knew, I took a moment to study the building.

The halantek is made of limestone, like most other Maradeki buildings, together with a pale silver stone that Blanka called holdko. It undulates like liquid beneath the thousands of lamps set into recesses, their flames intensified by their multi-faceted glass casings. The effect of light on the temple is sublime – it glows with an ethereal radiance. The temple itself is fashioned like a dome and has six narrow towers, balconied with arched windows, and within there are chimes designed to catch certain winds, so when the north wind blows you can hear one tune, and if the south- easterly blows you hear another. The roof is emerald and gold, and arches of jasmine and myrtle from the gardens gild the lower walls.

Many people looked at me. I was dark-skinned, dark-haired, and though I had dressed in some clean garments Blanka had provided, I was unmistakably Kalani. I smiled at those whose eyes I caught, and engaged in close conversation with Blanka so as to mitigate the sense of scrutiny. It is mere curiosity, I thought. They have so rarely seen strangers, especially from Kalan.

Inside, the temple is a vast, circular space with little decoration. I had expected to find great artworks here, and perhaps murals or tapestries, displays of scrolls or other religious iconography, but there is nothing of the sort. The floor is the same silver and limestone as the walls, and the windows are unadorned. In addition to the recessed lanterns, light comes

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from slender lamps hanging on long chains from the ceiling like drops of water.

As we circled the room, I saw that there were easels displaying a series of canvases at the centre of the room. I glimpsed a break in the crowd and, with Blanka, moved towards the paintings. There were twelve of them. They were tonal works depicting groups of large, spherical boulders. At first I could not focus on the work due to the press of bodies on all sides and the conversation that overwhelmed me in its speed and volume. Several people spoke to me, but too rapidly – their words slipped away and left me smiling stupidly.

I clasped Blanka’s arm, feeling dizzy, and, sensing my discomfort, she said into my ear, “When you meet someone, use this traditional phrase: Amit vetsz, azt aratsz.”

“What you sow, you reap?” I said.

“Yes, it is the traditional phrase used on Scriving Day,” she said. “Very formal, very respectful.”

I squeezed her hand in thanks and began to offer this phrase to those who greeted us while we jockeyed for position before the paintings. Several people repeated the phrase back to me and smiled, others gave bemused looks, and some ignored me entirely, speaking only to Blanka. It was a tremendous relief when we reached the front of the crowd and I could focus on the art.

I had seen some examples of Eszes’ work in the karzat and she had talked of it a little on our tour. She always took landscape as her theme, she said – she was interested in place as a site of memory. Often there were words in her paintings. Fragments of theology or poetry were inscribed in layers that connected the scene to Maradeki mythology or history. Her earlier work critiqued naturalism by revealing how landscape is always

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a site of cultural imagination. In this sense, she said, it was typical of Maradeki art. But in this series of paintings, I suspected she had moved away from these ideas, casting off the limitations of allegory.

Each stone was dense and weighty on the canvas. She had used oils, but mixed with something else that gave it a smooth finish, almost a glaze, that held the viewer at a slight remove. Despite the depth of the scene, it seemed translucent – and then I realised how she had done it. She had used an egg tempera mixed with her paints, and then varnished her work, building up thin layers. These were traditional techniques that had been used by the old Kalani masters as well, and it was with exhilaration that I leaned in to study the brush strokes, for the briefest moment feeling less foreign than I had since my arrival. Here, at least, I had found something familiar.

The stones seemed to vibrate dimly, and this vibration created the impression of sonority. As I moved from canvas to canvas, I sensed deep tones mingling and rising in a unified tenor. On my second circumnavigation of the works, I felt they were trying to speak to me, and on the third, I began to see the stones not as stones but more like ghosts or spirits from another realm that happened to touch upon ours in this clearing. Eszes had set her subjects on a neutral base with the vigorous impasto overlaid in contrasting shades – nudes and greys. There was an alien quality to the scene – almost a spectrality – but at the same time it could not be divorced from material reality.

It was the kind of work that made me despair, because in its figuration and non-figuration, its materiality and immateriality, its concreteness and its abstraction, I saw that which I could never create. I wondered if Eszes had painted the series with a specific intent or if her subject had overtaken her, for it seemed to me that the stones worked her, the stones painted her – that in her role as interpreter she had also become the subject of interpretation, and that was as it should be.

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I felt someone tugging on my sleeve and turned to find Eszes and Blanka standing behind me with a man dressed in resplendent robes of black velvet and gold brocade. I felt his disdain abrading me even as he smiled, showing small teeth capped in silver. I yearned for Usra, then. She would have looked this man in the eye and shown him she was not afraid.

“Pitr,” said Blanka. “Please, let me introduce you to Janos Rigo, chief of the halantek.”

He was a small man, almost ascetic, with a thin nose and sharp chin that seemed to cleave his face in two.

“Amit vetsz, azt aratsz,” I said, bowing low in the manner in which I had seen others address Blanka.

Janos’s eyes widened and at this he gave a sharp laugh, more like a cough. “I see you have been teaching him well,” he said to Blanka. “When did he arrive?”

“Only this afternoon,” she said.

“An auspicious day to come,” Janos said, raising his eyebrows.

“Certainly.”

“I did not know the karzat had begun to offer positions to foreign artists.”

Blanka smiled thinly. “The karzat has always welcomed new perspectives.”

“Ah,” said Janos. “Of course.”

I felt someone at my side and turned to see Eszes standing there.

“Oh, you have met our friend, Pitr,” she said. “It might be his paintings you’re honouring on the next Scriving Day, Janos.”

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Janos’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps,” he said. “But for now – Eszes, I must steal you away. It is time for the Scriving to begin. People are becoming impatient.”

He glanced over his shoulder, his eyeline both imperious and dismissive, and I saw that people had begun to gather around a low dais adjacent to the exhibition, and three people, dressed in the same cloaks as Janos but with fewer gold embellishments, had assembled there.

Janos took Eszes by the arm and they walked away. Janos had not spoken a single word to me, or, indeed, looked at me.

“The halantek has no say in the affairs of the karzat,” Blanka said bitterly. “I apologise, Pitr. I will speak to Janos about his hospitality at the next Council of the Prime.”

“Council?” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “The Council comprises myself, as head of the karzat, Janos, as head of the halantek, and also Halan Makav, head of the administration. We all have equal say in matters, despite what Janos thinks.”

Silence fell upon the room as Janos and Eszes mounted the dais. Janos stood before everyone and raised his hand. Silence fell.

“Welcome,” he said. “We gather this evening to celebrate the newest work from the great Eszes Toth and to offer it to our ancestors on the holiest of days – Scriving Day. This is the day on which we honour our ancestors and receive the messages and blessings which guide us in all things.”

At this the gathered people bowed their heads, pressed their hands together and touched the fingertips to their lips. I hurried to copy them.

“Before Chief-Interpreter Sakim begins, I think it prudent to emphasise that it is through art that life is made possible. The scriptures tell us that

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art is where life begins. Through the power of artmaking we sustain the living will of all things and secure the blessings of those who walked before us. So says Gabor Gabora, first interpreter of Maradek. And so it will be.”

“And so it will be,” murmured the crowd.

“If art fails, so does life,” continued Janos. “In Eszes’ work we can see this will to life, for creation redresses destruction.” At this, his gaze speared me and his eyes did not leave mine, so all turned to look at me also. “And we must choose which to be a part of – the side of art and of life, or the side of sickness and of death.”

There were murmurs of assent but, beside me, Blanka’s hands had curled to fists. I did not understand, then, what he meant. What destruction did I represent? How, as an artist like so many of them, like Eszes, could I be on the side of death?

Finished with his speech, Janos stepped back and allowed the oldest among the interpreters – her face was wrinkled and the skin on her hands was riven with ink – to take his place. The other two held a large silver dish filled with water. Sakim dipped two fingers in the water and sprinkled it upon Eszes’ head, muttering words I could not understand. When that was over, the gestured to her assistants, who set the bowl on a stand and stepped aside.

“Let’s begin,” Sakim said.

Everyone began to sing, led by Sakim, whose voice was low and rich. I could not understand the words of the song but the voices rose and swept through the room, sometimes dying down to a low murmuration, and other times rising to a plaintive wail. I saw the water in the silver bowl begin to tremble, then to simmer. As the song reached its crescendo, the water gurgled and swooped into the air in a great arc, but no longer as water – it had turned black as ink. I cried out in surprise. Blanka gripped

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my arm as I staggered backward, watching the ink soaring overhead. Surely this was elantry, I thought. Surely there is magic here, the kind of magic we had once known in Kalan. I felt myself trembling. Ada, I thought. Ada needs to see this. Ada should be here.

The water coiled round itself in the air like a liquid serpent. Sakim now sang alone and the water formed a great tree – no, not a tree, the roots of a tree – and they extended throughout the room, unfurling slowly at first and then spreading throughout the halantek, so thick I could no longer see the dais where Janos, Sakim and Eszes stood. The roots grew more offshoots and they spread about us so all I could see were the rhizomic entanglement of heads, bodies and limbs. I had the strange sensation of seeing things through the eye of a spider – a polygonal lens. Surely, I thought, surely this is elantry by some other name. Surely only a talented elantir – an artist who knew magic – could have crafted a ceremony capable of producing such effects.

It took a minute for everyone gathered to realise that the ink had formed solid wood. People reached out and touched the roots and found them immovable. Voices – some wondering, some afraid – began to clamour for the interpretation. Although I could not see her, I heard Sakim’s voice.

“I have never seen a sign like this before,” he said, “but the tree-roots were sung by Gyok, who made the first tree, before there was even sky or water that could nourish it. The roots survived on their own, in the darkness, until those things were sung, and then they began to grow.”

There were muffled voices and I thought Sakim must be consulting with her assistants. Beside me, Blanka was straining to see through the roots, to find out what was happening.

“Blanka,” I said. “Have you ever seen something like this before?”

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But before she could answer, the whispering stopped and Sakim began to speak again.

“Eszes’ art has brought us a unique interpretation from the ancestors,” she said. “Her stones evoke a time before people, before animals, before life itself could truly be said to have begun and there was only the idea of life – its potential. All things therefore begin in the unbegun, in the unseen, in the impossible space before. Art grows from this space. Art is anticipation in the face of nothing, art is hope in the void that is Not. Thus, the ancestors offer us the following thoughts: life persists despite its impossibility, grows even where there is no soil, and the energy that binds us together belongs to everyone – we all possess this innate will to life.”

At that point, the branches began to move again, to coil themselves up as though dying. Before they could disappear entirely, they turned to ink and the ink streamed back into the bowl. I could now see that it was Janos who gripped it. He moved forward, overstepping Sakim, to address us all.

“I apologise,” said Janos, “but as chief of the halantek, I must intervene.” He raised both hands and dashed the bowl upon the dais. It broke and water splashed out, clear.

“I declare this interpretation invalid,” he stated. “Though it is rare, and we cannot know the reasons, the ancestors have sent us a confused interpretation. Such signs have never been seen before. We must consult the scriptures and restage this Scriving at a later date.”

I saw Sakim open her mouth in protest but Janos silenced her with a look. She stepped back, head bowed, but I could feel her disagreement keenly.

“While the interpretation may as yet remain unclear,” continued Janos, “we can still celebrate the great Eszes’ new art.” He raised his arms to

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make himself look larger, the cloak fanning out behind him like the tail of some proud bird seeking a mate. “Through such work, we safekeep the process of creation, the living system that seeks fulfilment in each Maradeki citizen.” He did not look at me, but his words sliced to the heart of me nevertheless.

His speech was met with some murmurs of assent, though most were silent, and I felt the itch of hundreds of eyes on me. Blanka shifted away from me slightly, and I felt a channel of cold air dividing me from everyone else. I looked to Eszes. Her brown hands were clenched so tightly I could see the sinew of them outlined through the skin.

“We will now begin the Kinship prayer,” said Janos.

All knelt in preparation. As I was lowering myself to my knees, a young man approached me – an attendant of the halantek. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, in a hushed tone, through everyone could surely hear: “Sir, we must ask you to step outside the temple while the prayer is underway. It is custom. Only Maradeki are welcome to observe.”

Blanka surged to my aid. “He is a guest,” she protested. “An artist- resident of the karzat. He will stay.”

The attendant looked from Blanka to me and then back to Janos, whose eyes, though lowered in piety, sluiced through the room and bore me out on a tide of contempt.

“It is law,” was his only response.

What could I do? Blanka offered to accompany me outside but I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Thank you, but you must stay.”

As I left, I could feel the lingering energy in the room clinging to my skin, my clothing. It was familiar – I had felt it every year on Edda at temple, I

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had felt it emanating from my own daughter on the side of a mountain, I had felt it in the artists’ markets in Kalan when I was a boy. Elantry. Though they might think of it in another form, it was clear to me – there is magic here.

The next morning Blanka and I walked through the city together. As we walked I noted the murals, some of them still wet. Blanka explained they were renderings of the Scrivings that had taken place across the city throughout the day. I saw birds, and dancing women, and strange trees in those murals, along with other things I could not identify – shapes, words. We came across one that was black, and there was a word scrawled there in Maradeki I did not recognise, although I felt a sharp, hot jolt in my heart when I saw, scrawled underneath in blood red paint, my own name: Isalla.

Blanka did not pause to examine these or explain what that last mural meant. She took me beyond the walls of the city, skirting the western edge of the forest, until we came upon a long set of winding stairs that passed up into the mountains beyond the city’s north-west point, and from there we could see it. A small town, burned and blackened. Weeds had encroached, dust had settled, and trees had embraced it like a stone half- buried in the fold of the mountain.

“That is the ghetto,” she said. “Elantar lived there, a hundred years ago.”

I turned to her and she gestured for me to sit beside her. We found a place on a hillock with a good view and we looked down on the place where people like Ada had once lived.

“My mother always told me that we must protect what we hold dear, and I hold this city dearly, above all else. I’m afraid, now, of what we’re

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becoming. Janos calls this a golden age, but gold is only a metal in transition. It is malleable, and we must shape it for the better, Pitr.”

“We?”

“Yes, we.” She plucked a dandelion from the grass and twisted it in her fingers. “We are in danger of tumbling back into the past,” she said. “Of repeating old errors and committing old crimes. We cannot let that happen again.”

“Old crimes?” I found myself plucking my own dandelions, but in an agitated way. They swiftly lost their heads, and the heads piled up in my lap, the petals amputated or crushed. “Blanka, why is Janos so suspicious of me? Why have you brought me? What was that mural?”

Blanka sighed, set her flowers aside, and began to explain.

“There have been small numbers of elantar living in Maradek since the city’s founding,” she said. “They have always been forced to live in the ghetto. As you saw last night, Janos is not fond of things that do not fit into his interpretations of the scripture. There is no space for magic beyond the Scriving. I’m afraid he is only the latest in a long line of leaders to think this way. Many interpreters see elantry as a challenge to their spiritual authority and thus strive to destroy it.

“Seventy-five years ago, the largest population of elantar in Maradeki history lived in this ghetto. They were not permitted to go beyond those walls, to make art or to practise their magic. They had to register with the administration and were numbered. They were known as the piszok – the filth, the muck.”

That was the word that had been scrawled beside my own on the black mural. Piszok. I felt my gut churning and began to feel ill.

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“The piszok sought to leave the city and set up their own town in the north. My mother was a young woman then, working as a cleric in the office of the Prime. Janos’s grandfather, Marko Rigo, was head of the halantek in those years. It was he who convinced the others on the council.

“My mother wrote out the official edicts. At first they were orders to search houses and seize property. But then those orders became arrest warrants, and then prison sentences, even though the cases had not been heard in the lawcourts, and finally they were blank documents on which only an individual’s number was written, and the secret police could write their own charges and conduct their own punishments, whether there was evidence or no.”

“My mother remembered all the numbers, and all the names, and she made me memorise them too. Bartal Feher. Elias Hajos. Vilma Baranyi. Almos Marek. Terez Halasz.” She paused, taking a deep breath, her hands throttling the stems of the flowers. “In her later years, she would say nothing but these names, again and again. The names of the blank warrants she issued to the fanatikus.”

“Fanatikus?” I asked.

“That was the name they took for themselves,” she said. “The secret police. They had orders from Marko himself to stop the spread of elantry by any means. He said it would swallow the world.”

I trembled at the familiarity of the history. Even now Ada might be suffering the same persecution as Bartal, Elias and the rest. She could be taken, imprisoned, tortured. The old town inside its broken walls seemed shrivelled in my eyes, as though the sun did not touch it.

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“I am not an elantir or a piszok,” I said, though I knew how weak those words sounded. Blanka shrugged. She had turned the dandelions to milk in her hands and the smell was green and bitter.

“It doesn’t matter to Janos,” she said. “He will continue to build that image of you until he has his straw man to burn. Can’t you see? He will not abide you because you represent powers that lie beyond his authority. Whether you actually possess those powers is irrelevant.”

I did not know what to make of this situation. Was it possible that I had come so far only to face the exact same challenges I had fled? How could this happen? Why had I not listened to Usra? Why had I left my daughter in danger?

But no. This was not Kalan. There, I was powerless. There, they had tried to make my art meaningless by eradicating it and persecuting me. Here, art still had some power.

“That’s why you brought me here,” I said. “To make art.”

“Yes,” she replied. She was looking at me, begging me for an understanding I was loathe to give. I had been manipulated and now I saw that everything I had promised my wife and daughter was built on foundations of sand.

“It is art itself, and not the interpretation, that is valuable. And yet the interpretation has grown under Janos’s guidance until it becomes law. Art is merely a medium for his own political ideology. He is obsessed with maintaining some perfect state that exists only in his imagination – a world in which Maradek remains closed to all other people. But things are changing. Many of us at the karzat want to explore new art and new cultures. We believe that our art, and therefore our society, cannot grow without the influence of other perspectives.

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“You and I know that exploring new ways of seeing is what impels art. I understood that at once, from your letter. I wanted to offer you the position you asked for immediately, and I arranged all things. But I also knew your letter was an opportunity to do more.”

“An opportunity to challenge Janos?”

“It goes further than that,” insisted Blanka. “It goes to the very purpose of art. If it stagnates, so will we. If it becomes near-sighted, so do we. We cannot stay stuck in the present. We must seek other futures. There is a passage in the scripture that Janos never cites in his interpretations:

Beyond, there is a place where we fling ourselves in to swim through the illuminations of a sea that runs deeper than deep fuller than full I will meet you on the way to the deep to the bottom to the beginning of the beyond.

“That, Pitr, is the function of art. But in Janos’s purview it has become satisfactory merely to replicate what already exists to sustain his ideal state. Our art is no longer art. It has become a boundary. As an outsider, they would present you as testament to our purity, for your art will not measure up to ours under Janos’s interpretation. You will be a subject, but never a citizen.”

The smell of the dandelions was only adding to my nausea.

“What do you want from me, Blanka?” I said.

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“We have the same interests,” she said. “You must show Janos and the other Maradeki that your art is worthwhile in order to bring your family to safety. And that will not be possible until we free art itself from Janos’s interpretations.”

“So what do you propose?”

“We will hold a Scriving for your work, as Eszes suggested.”

“But surely Janos will not allow it.”

“I have many friends,” she said. “Sakim, the chief-interpreter, is a devout woman. She will interpret any work, for that is her function. She will conduct the ceremony for you, the right way, free of Janos’s interference. And the interpretation will reveal that, no matter your heritage as Kalani, as Maradeki or otherwise, art itself construes the world. Art itself is the force through which we come into being. It is not through the words of politicians like Janos. The possibility art offers, in its multiplicity and its difference, will stand as rejection of his monological and self-serving interpretations.”

I could only imagine what Usra would say to such claims. She would find them too esoteric for her liking.

“I could leave,” I said. “I could take the next Maradeki skyship home.”

“And have gained nothing,” she said. “You came for a reason.”

“Not to fight your battles.”

“They are your own, too.”

If she was telling the truth, then I had a chance, here, to change things through my art. If there could be a valid interpretation of my work perhaps I would be accepted as a citizen. Perhaps Janos’s influence would weaken. Perhaps. There were no certainties. Many things could go

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wrong. The Prime could decide to deport me. I could fail to create a worthy piece of art. The ceremony could go against me, the interpretation a negative one. I felt the added weight of Usra and Ada’s expectations settle on my shoulders. I dug my fingers into the soil and closed my eyes.

I remembered what Fadel had said to me the day before I left for Maradek.

“What an artist truly requires,” he said, pouring me that bitter thrice- brewed tea from the nettle he cultivated in his window sill, “more than eyes or materials, more than subject matter, is faith.”

He pressed into my hands his copy of Busra’s Miracles of Hope, which now, as I write in my studio, sits beside me, open to a passage he has marked:

Faith is a willingness to surrender to the irruptions of this strange world. Faith is ambitious, faith is a resolution. Faith, which cannot exist without hope, is the place from which we spring eternal. I am. We are. That is enough to begin.

On the hillock, looking down at the remains of the ghetto, I felt Blanka’s hand settle on my shoulder.

“I must return to my studio,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied, “you have a lot of work to do.”

Maradek

It has been three weeks since I arrived in Maradek. As if to mark the occasion, this morning a skyship from Kalan arrived. A wreck of a thing, it limped into the open sky outside the Maradeki harbour before descending in lopsided revolutions, plopping into the sea and causing a tremendous wave that upset many of the fishermen’s moorings. A

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meeting of the Council of the Prime was immediately summoned and Blanka, who had stood with me at the windows of the common room in the karzat’s resident tower, rushed away to the halantek to meet with Janos and Halan, promising to bring back answers. I knew I would not be welcome at any meeting, no matter how greatly I desired to be present.

New murals have sprung up every day since I last wrote, many of them scrawled with the derogatory piszok and others depicting scenes of death. Crows. Fire. Bones. A ghetto. A clocktower. I do not know what to make of them all, but I feel the malice behind them as keenly as I feel the eyes that follow me. I am afraid to go through the city without an escort. I am afraid of leaving the karzat. I thought I knew fear. I thought that nothing I encountered here in Maradek would be as terrible as what I faced at home. But at home, at least I had Usra. Her sturdiness. Her implacable nature. Her will. I had Ada. I had Fadel. I even had Mrs Maro. Here, I have no one. Even Blanka seeks to use me as a tool.

I wait in my studio for Blanka to return, sketching angrily, prisms on top of prisms, angles within angles, until there is no space for new lines and I erase it all and start over again on the sullied page.

Blanka returned a few hours ago with grievous news.

First: The Kalani who arrived on the skyship have been removed from the city. At first, Blanka said, Janos wanted to send them back out to sea in their broken ship. Halan wanted to obtain all the information he could from them in case the Thierran energy lords plan to move on Maradeki borders and take the city for Reaping. Blanka said they should treat them as guests and help them settle in Maradek permanently, or reach other destinations, if that is their wish. After hours of debate in which Janos repeatedly cited his spiritual authority, there was a compromise. All the

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Kalani have been sent north, to a place called Tartozkodik. Blanka says it is an old town used only as an outpost now, but there are some basic facilities there. She says they will be safe, at least for now. She says Halan, while not on our side (which side is that, I wonder?) is not on Janos’s either. He perceives a threat, but not the same threat as Janos.

Second: Janos and Halan have forbidden me from leaving the karzat without an official escort. I must notify the Council in advance if I intend to leave and Halan will send a guard to accompany me on my business. For your protection, is what they said. The majority decision was carried, despite Blanka’s protestations.

Third, and the most unsettling news of all: there will be no more trade between Kalan and Maradek. Halan will suspend all skyships and cancel all contracts. He says these sanctions will force the Thierrans to stop allowing their people to leave and encroach on our borders without the Prime’s leave.

At first I could not grasp the meanings of all these decisions and only stood with knuckles pressed into my eyes as I hunched over my worktable, where Blanka found me. I wanted to leave. Immediately. I began to wonder when the next skyship back to Kalan would depart. But then I remembered. There would be no more skyships. There would be no way of getting home. There would be no way of sending any more money or letters. There would be no way for Usra and Ada to join me.

I had wondered if Usra and Ada could be on that ship. There had been rumours of such skyships departing for foreign lands back at home. Usra and I had wondered if we, too, should take ship and make for another city. But we had deemed it too risky. If we were caught by the Hand we would be killed. Yet here we were, sundered. At home, perhaps my wife and child are dead. Starving. Dying of thirst.

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But perhaps they are here. Could they, even now, be settling down for the night in the Maradeki outpost in the north? Could they be wondering where I am? Could they be looking up at the sky, hoping I will come for them? I need to visit that camp. I can help. I can translate. I can mediate. I can speak with others who might have news of my family. I must go to them. I cannot. What am I to do?

I pleaded with Blanka to let me visit the camp but she only shook her head.

“Janos will not even let you leave the karzat,” she said. “He will not allow you to speak with these people. If you do, he will have you arrested or deported immediately. A skyship will drop you at the Kalan border and you’ll be left to fend for yourself.”

I thought of the vacant villages I’d seen on the Kalani coast on the journey to Maradek on board the Hullamok. I would not survive there. There was no water, no food, no signs of life. Even if I did find people, how would I get home? No, I could not be ditched on the edges of my homeland. That would be exile. That would be death. Perhaps, as a piszok, that is what Janos thinks I deserve.

This morning I came to the studio and began work because I did not know what else to do. I sketched furiously with charcoal on thick sheets of woodpaper. I continued to develop my geometries from the previous evening, working with sharp, angular configurations. By the afternoon, I had over two dozen of them and I pinned them to the wall, layering them in places, until they resembled the generalised coordinates Usra said dictated the physical systems of space. They made me dizzy and I had to turn away and sit down at my table. I had slept little and there, slumped over my table, I felt like crying.

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I know I should not lose hope yet. I must do everything in my power to rectify things. I must make art. I must confront Janos and Halan, if I can. I must find other ways of communicating with Usra and Ada.

Is art the answer? Can art resolve this tangled web of politics and religion and commerce? Blanka seems to think so. She says that my art is powerful precisely because it differs from Maradeki traditions and expectations. It represents what lies outside ideology and beyond interpretation.

I know that art begins by rejecting loss. Art cannot accept nothingness. It unveils, in aesthetic terms, the lack or the void that is the present, and moves beyond. Art is surfacing in some other time and some other place. Art is the emergence of possibility. Can my work reveal the falsity and the alienation of Maradeki society? Can it do so in a way that is new, yet also borrows from and critiques Maradeki traditions and practices? For now, I only know that it must, not how it will do so. It is a dangerous path to tread, but one I have walked before, in my Hunger series. Is it one I will always have to follow?

Art is no less political here than it was in Kalan, though with important differences: there, at least, I knew the rules I was breaking. Here, there is a vastly different tradition, a different aesthetic, different frameworks through which art is created, perceived and judged, and I do not yet know this language. Art, after all, is a question of language. Artists give things existence – thought is turned to form. This happens through a kind of language, and this language differs in different traditions, in different cultures. It differs from artist to artist. It differs from work to work. But this is the secret of art – thoughts, as things, speak, but the words are not the thing. No – language, after all, is not its content. Language is interpretation. These thought-things ought to translate being into matter. I struggle with this here, where I still cannot find quite the right language

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for my work, and so, for me, I cannot yet understand life, for my own thoughts, my own being, is hidden in the absence of language.

My teacher Busra once told me that you cannot be an artist without being able to perceive what does not yet exist. “You have to imagine what is possible,” she would say to her apprentices, “and represent it immanently. That is the challenge of the artist, and also the highest duty.”

But what, Usra would say, is the highest duty of a father and a husband? Can they be the same, in this instance, as Blanka would have me believe? Is this where my choices have left me? My choices. Not Usra’s. Not Ada’s. Mine. But now they have to live with them too. How do I live with that? How do I make art that deals with my own guilt, my own responsibility? How do I make art at all?

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Part 2

Frequencies

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ADA

We come through the gryphon gates half-drowned and land-starved. As we pass through the harbour, we tilt our heads back to catch the rain in our mouths, cupping our hands and tipping it down our throats.

When the boats dock, our legs are so weak the Maradeki sailors have to help us ashore. Mami and I hold on to each other to stop ourselves from falling. We’ve grown used to the skyship and our legs are no good on land.

We move slowly down the stone dock towards the harbour foreshore and more Maradeki men come through a gate to flank us. They wear a supple armour, black, that looks like braided leather, with short swords belted at their hips. Guards. They stare at us, their faces so pale they frighten me. They do not speak to us, but they watch us with their grey eyes and I’m too frightened to stare back the way Lahle would. I look around for her but I can’t see her. The rain distorts everything; all the faces blur together.

The harbour smells of mud and timber, saltfish and wax, shot through with something else, sharp and clear, that makes me lightheaded. Papa told us about this in his letters. There’s so much more air here, he’d written, that I do not know what to do with it. Every breath is like a gasp or a surprise. He said the trees purify the air so I take deep breaths, feeling the sting of it in my nose and throat. It’s only then that I realise: I’m standing where he stood. We’ve arrived. Mami’s hand is trembling in mine, but I don’t know if it’s from exhaustion or excitement.

I look around, trying to tally those who have survived. Thirty-two, thirty- four, thirty-six. Orgol is missing. And the Beszels. And Haydar, the sackball bully. His father, Firat, circles the group, shouting his son’s name over and over again, but there is no response, and Firat begins to wail, his anguish flung about on the wind.

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We can’t see the city. The harbour sits at the bottom of a rise and thick limestone walls obstruct any view. Further down the harbour there are fishing boats docked, the booms rising and falling in the swell. Past the boats I can see roundhouses where the fishermen weigh their catch. Crates filled with fruit and vegetables lie stacked outside storehouses, waiting to be taken into the city, and a few goats huddle in a pen, chewing, the steam rising from their nostrils. I can sense eyes on us, even from this distance. A dour man with a fleshy face sticks his knife in the guts of a large silver fish and wrenches out the blade, spraying pink and grey juice. Another woman closes the windows of her storehouse, perhaps just to shut out the rain, but I glimpse her fingers and eyes peering at us through the slats.

Nisa presses through the group and approaches one of the guards. She speaks to him in Maradeki. I wish I’d spent more time in her language class. I can’t understand what she says but the guard is shaking his head.

Then a horn sounds and the guards gesture for us to follow them through the gate and into one of the towers in the limestone wall. We walk into a large circular yard. As we enter, Nisa looks over her shoulder at us, at the other guards bringing up the rear, and I read distrust in the tight line of her mouth, the narrowing of her eyes.

Inside the yard, more men dressed in red and black uniforms wait next to a vessel. It’s the most beautiful dirigible I’ve ever seen, the great balloon shaped like a fish painted with gold and green scales and an undercarriage wrought of timber designed to look like waves. Several Maradeki officials emerge from a timber roundhouse in the centre of the yard. Like their kin, they are lighter-skinned than us Kalani, their hair straight and dark, pulled back into braids or cropped at the jaw.

I know something is wrong when they close the gates behind us. They clang together. A chain grates on the bars and the padlock snaps shut. Before we can ask what’s happening, one of the officials asks us a question

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in Maradeki. Nisa replies, raising her hand, and, at his invitation, climbs the low steps of the roundhouse to translate.

I finally catch sight of Lahle. She’s standing at the front, beside her father and uncle. Her lips are pressed together, disappearing into her pale, rain- streaked face. She sees me, too. I try to smile at her but it comes out a grimace and she nods and turns away, understanding something I hadn’t meant to convey.

I begin to quiver from the toes up. It’s not the cold; it’s as though I have a fear-sense, a fear-logic. There’s an inevitability to this. I feel as though a tide has begun to flow and I’m trapped in the middle of it. I tug at the neck of my filthy tunic. My skin feels too tight. I want to run. I whip my head around, trying to find a way out. I see the thin, bedraggled faces of the surviving passengers, the high wall mounted with spikes and the guards with their swords at their belts. For a second I think I see my father’s face at the gate but I blink and there’s only grey harbour and the crack of a red flag torn away by the wind. I shout for Papa and everyone looks at me. Mami hugs me against her.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

I try to wipe the rain from my face, looking back at the gate, but I can’t see him there.

“Papa,” I say.

“What?” She’s not listening – she’s straining to hear Nisa’s translation, like everyone else.

Papa.

“This is Halan Makav, administrator of Maradek,” says Nisa, gesturing to a squat man with grey hair who is dressed in long robes, burgundy and black. “He welcomes us to Maradek. He says that we have travelled a long

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way. Some of us might require medical attention. He is happy to provide us with healers, food and lodging.”

Excited murmurs run through the crowd, but I feel the tide gathering momentum, the undercurrent eddying beneath me.

“Since our vessel has been destroyed, we will be taken on board this dirigible to the lodgings they have prepared for us. Several other ships from Kalan have arrived in the previous months so they have established a camp for us in the northern mountains. They understand that we come seeking citizenship; however, the most stringent policies must be applied in this process.”

The others can feel it now, too. The waves rising around them and the ground falling away.

“He says we come from a land where dark magic is practised, and that is not the Maradeki way,” continues Nisa. “He says they must exercise the utmost caution in assessing our applications to ensure the safety and prosperity of the whole of Maradek.”

What Nisa says next is lost in a flurry of shouted objections. Firat and Ediz are both moving towards the officials, their hands fisted, but several guards block their path and they hesitate. Theirs words are flung towards me, jumbled by the wind – the curses snap in my ears. Nisa is arguing with the officials but they only shake their heads, their faces resolute.

Firat forces his way forward but stops just shy of the guards. Their hands rest on the hilts of their weapons and their eyes dart from Emre to Ediz and then to Firat.

“Can’t they see we need help?” he shouts to Nisa. “We can’t go anywhere until we’ve found him. My son – ”

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Nisa speaks to Halan, faster now, gesturing from Firat to the sea. But Firat doesn’t wait for a response. He curses, turns away and strides toward the gate. He seizes the padlock and pulls at it with all his strength. When it doesn’t budge, he grabs the steel uprights and rattles them wildly. Maradeki guards approach and try to pull him away, but he swings at them, staggers and falls. He begins to beat himself about the head and neck, crying. No one dares to go to him; he is beyond aid.

“Halan says we must take this dirigible to a place called Tartozkodik,” says Nisa, “and wait for the government’s decision there. If we do not board the vessel, they will escort us to a boat and expel us immediately from the city.”

“Where would we go?” Emre asks.

Nisa doesn’t answer. I felt my throat constricting, remembering how close I’d come to drowning.

“We didn’t come here to wait for any government,” Ediz says. “We came to be free.”

Nisa seems defeated. The rain pastes her hair to her scalp and she’s so thin her shoulder blades stand out beneath her rain-drenched shirt like some sort of carapace. “Our ship is gone, the captain drowned. What choice do we have? We have nothing.”

“My son,” moans Firat. Beyond the gate I can see enormous storm clouds rolling down on the horizon. The sea is a black mass, slapped by the wind into jagged waves.

“How many others are waiting there?” shouts Ediz. “Ask that Maradeki dog how many Kalani they’ve got trapped in this camp.”

Nisa speaks with Halan, and when she turns back to face us her face is grim.

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“He says many have arrived before us. Almost a thousand. They all wait in the camp.”

“A thousand!” shouts Emre. “How long have they been here?”

“Several months.”

“Without the government’s decision?”

“No decision has been reached yet.”

“Then it’s a prison!”

Nisa shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know.”

Mami surprises me then, stepping forward to speak.

“My husband is here,” she says. Her voice is barely audible above the rain. “His name is Pitr. He is an artist at the karzat. Please, Nisa, can you ask?”

Nisa turns back to Halan. He listens to her closely and then confers with another official for a moment before asking her a question.

“Do you have any proof?” Nisa says.

“Yes,” says Mami. “We have letters.”

She fumbles in her pockets to retrieve Papa’s letters but what she pulls out is almost mush – the paper is soaked through, the pages slopping together and the ink nothing more than a faint bluish stain. Halan glances from Mami to me and then back at Nisa, impassive.

“The letters have been ruined by the sea,” Mami says, louder now. “If they would only check at the karzat, Nisa. They have to ask for Pitr Isalla. He’s my husband. He’s here, waiting for me and my daughter. We must go to him.”

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When Nisa begins to translate, Halan and the other officials shake their heads and turn away. They disappear inside the roundhouse and the door shuts behind them. Mami suddenly jerks into action, striding forward as though to follow them inside and demand more answers. Two guards block her path. She tries to push them aside but they slap her down and she falls to her hands and knees with a cry. What remains of the letters is smeared across the cobblestones. I run forward to help her up.

“Ada,” she gasps, “we can’t get on that dirigible. Your father is here. We have to find him.”

I don’t know what to say. I look around again. There’s no way out. The guards have formed two lines, like a tunnel at the entrance to the dirigible, which looms over us, no longer beautiful but ominous. Nisa comes down the steps and kneels beside us to help Mami rake the ruined letters together into a mound of pulp.

“Please,” I say to Nisa. “What can we do?”

Nisa turns to one of the guards standing nearby and asks him a question in Maradeki. Although I can’t understand his response, his voice is tainted with malice, and Nisa shouts at him, shaking her hands. He just looks at her, his face so still and pale it could have been carved from the same limestone as the city walls.

Nisa turns away from him with a curse. “They refuse to send for him,” she says to Mami and me. “They only say we must follow the protocols. For now, I’m afraid we’ll get nowhere. I’m sorry.”

We have no choice, then. Mami’s mouth opens and closes but she makes no sound. She keeps shaking her head and her hands squeeze the ruined letters so tightly that water drips from the pulp onto the stones. Nisa and I help her to her feet, and we join the other passengers huddling together against the rain.

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The guards watch us board the dirigible. Mami walks between Nisa and me, her steps uncertain, but Emre and Ediz stride on board with their backs straight and their eyes glistening. Firat enters last. He sits alone, his hands tucked beneath his knees, his eyes unseeing. It’s warm and dry inside, and we use this chance to take stock of those present.

A dozen guards board the ship with us for the flight to Tartozkodik with the dirigible’s small crew. There is a captain in a red and black greatcoat with gold braid on the shoulders, and two assistants wearing simpler red and grey uniforms with peaked caps. They barely look at us before stepping through to the bridge and closing the door behind them. They start the propellers. Swiftly, the dirigible rises. It’s not like the clumsy, lumbering skyship – this vessel is light and fast, and we’re soon airborne, rising above the courtyard and then the city walls.

We catch a brief glimpse of Maradek before the dirigible turns north, towards the mountains we’d sighted from two days out at sea. At first I can’t make sense of the city – it’s nothing like any place I’ve ever seen or read about. The buildings are made of white stone that glistens even beneath the cloud cover, and tall trees with pale golden trunks intertwine with the buildings so the city appears to nest inside a living, breathing woodland. Lamps glisten like jewels among the branches and warm light shines through the windows. I see many things Papa described in his letters, more splendid even than I’d imagined – the green and gold roof of their temple, the halantek; the wide thoroughfare of arched boughs lined with statues of the city’s renowned artists; and the karzat, its glass dome shimmering like a window to another world, its towers tall enough to pierce the raincloud ceiling.

I watch the city for as long as possible, before it disappears behind the mountain ridges encircling it on all sides. Despite the clouds, all the light concentrates around it, as though it’s illuminated from within. It reminds me of the pieces of moonstone Mami once collected in Kalan. They had the

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same elusive light, the same flux of depth and hue. Mami loved them because they were beautiful. Papa loved them because they reminded him of Mami.

The city slips out of view and we drift on, high above the green sea of the mountain forests. Papa. Papa. Papa. I wonder if he can hear me thinking his name over and over like a prayer. I’d seen his face so vividly through the bars of the gates. Had it really been him? Surely not. If he had seen us, he would have broken right through those gates and demanded they set us free.

Mami is motionless beside me. Her hands are clasped tightly in her lap and her posture is so rigid I’m not sure if she’s even breathing.

“Mami,” I say, “are you all right?”

She looks at me with flat, black eyes, then turns away and stares out the window, resting her forehead against the glass. I want her to hold me, to reassure me. But I know that look. It’s the same one she gave me on the mountainside when she saw me with the seedling.

Does she blame me for this?

Is this all my fault?

I need to be brave. I need to think of how we’ll send word to Papa. But I’m so tired. My hands are shaking and my feet are numb. I just want to sleep.

I turn away from Mami. I shut my eyes against the hazy expanse of the mountains framed by the window and my hand closes around the seed in its pouch.

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USRA

Dawn glimmers across the sea. Inside the crowded tent that is now our home, Ada makes a sound. A low murmur, like a child who has not yet learned speech. I get little sleep these days. Nothing good waits for me in my dreams. I rise early, before the bell, to watch the first flush of the sun over the mountains and hear the birds singing their dawn-songs from the forest beyond the fenceline.

It has been two months since we crashed into the sea outside of Maradek. The dirigible took us away from the city, away from Pitr, as the storm ebbed out to sea. I remember thinking at the time of all the things I should do. Talk to the guards. Comfort Ada. Come up with a plan. So many things. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the remains of the skyship torn to flotsam and tossed about in the foaming deep. The way the bodies of the drowned sank beneath the waves, the water filling their eyes and mouths and turning their hair to salt-drenched weed. The whole flight to Tartozkodik, I’d kept my eyes closed, and when we arrived, I’d opened them to see the waves flinging themselves against the coastline as though they resented confinement. I was convinced that they would rise up in a great tide, drag me out to sea and turn me into salted bloat to be taken by the fish. Ada had forced me to my feet and led me down the dirigible’s steps to the city square where we’d landed. I’d shaken her off, afraid that if the waves came for me she’d be swept along too, and staggered along on my own.

The guards had prodded us into uneven lines in the square while the Maradeki officials talked among themselves about what was to be done with us. The rain had stopped and people came out to greet us – the ones who’d made it before us. They were wet to the skin, as though they too had almost drowned. It soon became clear: there wasn’t enough shelter or food. The tents and latrines were flooded and overflowing. More supplies were supposed to come, they said, but there was never enough.

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The head of the camp, a man named Tibor, had a belligerent look. His uniform was relaxed – the collar unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up. He spoke in short, terse sentences to Nisa. There were no extra tents, he said. We would have to make do sharing. He refused to give us food because we had missed the evening meal time, even though the little children were crying with hunger and we were gnawed-through from weeks of starvation. He assigned us numbers, which are now stitched into the breasts of the tunics issued to us. It was then we had the first taste of what life would be like – strict to the point of stupidity, all in order to belittle and dehumanise us.

Tartozkodik looks like a ghost town in the morning light. We were told, when we first arrived, that Tartozkodik means dwell, and the name encompasses both meanings. Both a place to stay and a place to ruminate on the past. By the pre-dawn light, I can see the burnt husks of its broken walls and the fallow places where there were once streets or gardens, the grey triangles of the tents packed so densely among the structures that the town looks like a strange planet with a prismatic topography.

The first hint of the rising sun glints on the wire-tipped struts that surround the town, and all around the forest bristles and growls, as though eager to eat us up, drag us into its deeps and claim us as its own. I wish it would. I wish the trees would storm the fence, tear up the old stone and seize this place from us. Spit us out. Leave us to wander free.

Below me is the rocky shoreline of the narrow inlet. What was once a boathouse has been turned into a shower block, and a series of crude timber buildings have been erected as storeroom, kitchen and infirmary in the town square. Behind me, the broken city wall rests at the foot of a steep incline. There, stone turns to wild meadow, and the clocktower tops the rise, casting a deep and ominous shadow over Tartozkodik.

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Even though I feel a long, hot morning building in that red dawn, I know we won’t be able to escape the dreams. These things creep into our beds at night and scare us from our sleep so we get no rest and wander through the daytime like phantoms. They began the first night we arrived in Tartozkodik. I dream, night after night, of walking through fields outside of Kalan where there’s nothing growing – just empty rows of broken stalks and salt welling in the threshed soil. I look up and see clouds like shards of ice coming to bear down on me. They pierce my flesh at a thousand points, soaking the field in my blood, and suddenly I’m a scarecrow tied to a timber pole, and birds that cry in Ada’s voice came to peck at me while Pitr walks the rows, pulling seeds from the pits in his skin to spatter in the crimson furrows.

Those who’ve been exiled here for longer than us – some for months – say they have all had terrible dreams since they arrived. But as more and more people enter Tartozkodik, these dreams swell and engulf us all so night after night we’re tormented by the worst images. Some of the guards speculate that they come from Maradeki spirits who want us banished from their shores. Tibor himself says they come from the clocktower. It is a cursed site. Black magic was once practised here, he says, and the whole village was condemned and razed by fire decades ago. Whether we will be condemned as well remains to be seen.

The bell tolls. Lights flicker in the window of the guardhouse. I can hear children crying as I slip back inside the tent where Damla is helping her sister, Seda, to her feet. One of Seda’s hands is wrapped around her taut belly, the other resting on her sister’s shoulder. Ada lies motionless on the floor, her hand still tucked beneath her head, untroubled by the bell.

I had cried with gratitude when the sisters offered Ada and me a place in their tent the evening we arrived. We all sleep on a thin layer of blankets and sacks, except for Seda. She is eight months pregnant, and Damla has pushed their two camp beds together for her to lie on. I had taken one look

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at Seda’s puffy feet and her hand massaging her chest, and known something was wrong. I have dedicated myself to helping Seda, gathering supplies from across the camp in preparation for the child. The work galvanises me and helps me ignore the place in which I’ve found myself – the place to which I’ve been relegated.

“Do you need help?” I ask Damla.

“No, you go on,” she says with a weary smile. “You did enough last night.”

Seda has slept restlessly the last few weeks, complaining of chest pain. The camp’s doctor diagnosed heartburn and gave Seda some chalky tablets to chew, but they didn’t ease the pain. She was awake for hours last night with palpitations. Damla and I took turns helping her sit up when she woke suddenly, gasping for air, and walking her to the latrines – she is too large to squat unassisted. The baby is due any day and though Damla insists her sister be taken to the city to deliver the baby with the assistance of midwifes, the requests have been ignored by Tibor. The doctor only visits once a fortnight and will not attend us again for another five days. We hope Seda will hang on for that long. It’s a big baby, and her first. Damla and I expect a difficult birth, even without taking into consideration Seda’s chest pains and weakness.

Ada slowly rises from her sleeping mat. Her arms are covered in insect bites and there are scrapes on her knees and elbows. I don’t know what she gets up to with Lahle during the day but she often comes back filthy and bruised. She says they explore and I’m too weary to interrogate her. I’ve been concentrating my energies on Seda and the baby. I’ve been focusing on what I can do, in these circumstances. Because what I can’t do – leave this town, speak to my husband, go home – is unbearable.

“Do you think she’ll be all right?” Ada asks as we step outside. Our tent is close to the fenceline, so each morning we’re confronted with lines of wire,

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spiked and rusting. Sometimes I fondle the barbs, pricking myself intentionally, just to watch the drops of blood strike the earth.

“I don’t know,” I say.

We exchange greetings with others emerging from their tents, bleary-eyed, scratching at their bites. Parents carry their screaming children to the latrines. In twos and threes we filter into the square by the old granaries that now serve as the guards’ quarters where we wait for the roll call.

They call us by number. Here, we have no names. We must be counted present before we can receive our morning rations. Some have tried to escape, but the guards patrol at random after dark and there is nowhere to go. Tartozkodik is a hundred miles from the city, surrounded by mountains with impenetrable forest and deep ravines. Two were lost that way, before they topped the fences with razor wire. Without supplies and with no forest craft they did not survive long. Guards were sent to search and found evidence – a bloody shoe, an empty water skin. There are bears in this forest, they say, and poisonous snakes. I’m not sure if it’s true, but the fear is the important thing.

We don’t see Tibor much anymore. I think he’s afraid of us. He doesn’t like us speaking Kalani. He thinks we mock him in our mother tongue. After the first week, he stopped appearing at roll call. He stays inside the guardhouse and his assistant, Andras, reads out our numbers. All nine hundred of them, once in the morning and once at night. Andras would prefer to use our names at the roll call, or skip it altogether, but Tibor says we are not yet citizens and therefore should only be referred to as application numbers to prevent any prejudice developing in the procedure.

Of all the guards, Andras is the most amicable. He distributed some books among us when we arrived – mostly children’s art books, so the pictures could help us learn the language. Tibor took the books away when he

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found out what Andras had done. He said Maradeki art was not for people like us. He said the Prime would pass their judgement, and no one else.

We all wonder why the decision is taking so long. It does not bode well for us. If we’re sent home I’m sure we will be killed. Our lives erased, unmourned. But if we’re accepted… No, I can’t allow myself to speculate. The only way to survive in this place is to pretend the past and the future no longer exist. I try not to think of Pitr, even when I write to him and give the letters to the guards, knowing they will never send them. It’s too painful. I had not thought it possible to grieve for someone still living, but that’s the best way I can think of describing it. I wonder if he knows we have left Kalan, if the authorities have informed him that we’re here, stuck in transit like mislabelled goods. I wonder if he has written. Perhaps even now, letters from Pitr are sitting, unopened, on Tibor’s desk. The thought makes my fingers twitch.

After Andras reads out our numbers and counts us present, people begin to line up for breakfast. We shuffle through the kitchen, picking up the old bread and the rotting fruit not sold at the Maradeki markets that week, shipped in for us on the same dirigible that delivers the change of guard. We are not trusted with knives and forks and must eat with our fingers instead. When we finish eating, Ada says she’s going to find Lahle and darts off. I join a line of women waiting at the guardhouse for needles, wool and thread, which are distributed and returned each day, the exchange marked in a ledger.

As I settle in the knitting circle, continuing with the teddy bear I began making the previous day for the baby, I watch Ada run up the causeway, no doubt to find Lahle. Where does the girl get to? She speaks even less than she did on board the ship and I worry that she is slipping away from me. But how can she be, when we live in such close confines, practically sleeping on top of each other? No, Ada is fine. It’s the baby that I have to worry about. The baby that will be born neither here nor there. The baby

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that will be neither Kalani nor Maradeki. The baby that is in-between and therefore exists nowhere. The baby is my priority for now.

There is little talk among the women. We all busy our hands to keep our minds at bay. The clacking of the needles helps distract me from thoughts of Pitr, of Ada, of scarecrows in fields of blood.

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ADA

I’m looking for Lahle after the morning roll call when I almost collide with a guard coming down the causeway. I try to dart around him but he blocks the way with his body and I’m forced to stand there with my eyes downcast while he looks me up and down.

“Your father,” he says in broken Kalani, “is a filthy mage.”

I know better than to answer back.

“You deserve to be sent home,” he says, “all of you piszok, before you desecrate these lands and bring sickness upon us all.”

His twisted mouth and narrowed eyes show his disgust, but I suspect he’s also afraid of me, and of all of us. While many of the guards keep to their duties and say little to us, some are like this one. They address us by the numbers sewn on our tunics, call us names like mage and witch and piszok, and take any chance to give a beating, shout at a child or withhold food. We hate them but there’s nothing we can do. We’re all too afraid of being sent home.

“Where are you going, little mage’s whelp?” says the guard. He takes a step closer to me and I can smell the bread and the coffee on his breath. My stomach tightens. Our rations are meagre – two meals a day, and the fare is poor, from the spoiled produce at Maradeki markets – but the officials and the guards eat meals prepared by a cook, three times a day.

“Nowhere,” I say.

“Your father’s art,” he says, “is laughed at in our city, did you know that, little piszok? He is thrown out of our temples and even the servants will not clean his paintbrushes or wash his clothes.”

My heart is beating so hard that it makes my body throb from head to toe. I want to slap this man, push him down, kick dirt in his eyes. He knows

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nothing of Papa’s art. He just wants to hurt me. I won’t let him. I won’t show him any fear.

He puts his face in mine, though I still refuse to meet his gaze.

“Look out,” he says, pointing upwards with a gloved index finger. “Look out for the skies. When the rain comes you’ll be sent home. This dry will break and the water will wash your sickness away.”

With this he gives me a shove and I sit down hard, the heels of my hands bearing the brunt of the fall. He nudges me with his booted foot but I manage to stop myself from cringing. I keep my eyes on him, determined not to show him that I’m afraid.

“Our ancestors have sent you here as a reminder,” he says, “of the impurity of magic. The only pure thing is art, and your father, that defiler,” he spits, “will soon see that his little pictures are worth less than a boar’s tit.”

With that, he strides past me, making sure to kick up plenty of dust on his way.

Lahle finds me still sitting there, looking at the grazes on my palms.

“What happened?” she asks, helping me to my feet.

“Nothing,” I say. I dust myself off and we rest against a set of cracked stone steps beneath a broken arch. “It was just one of the guards.”

“Did he hit you?”

I shake my head. “He was just talking more of that superstitious stuff about the rain.”

Since we arrived two months ago there’s been no rain. Some of the Maradeki believe that we’ve brought the drought in Kalan with us across the sea and that no rain will come until we’re sent home.

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“My father was talking with Andras about these superstitions,” she says. “He says some people in the city believe we’re using our dark magic against them to steal the life from the land. Others say a Kalani army will appear any day soon and that the Prime must raise its own armies to defend the city.”

I shake my head again, pulling at my filthy, ill-fitting tunic, my fingers tracing the numbers branded above my breast pocket. “How can they believe such things?”

“They’re just rumours.”

“Rumours start somewhere.”

“We can’t help rumours.”

No, I think, all we can do is worry about them.

Any hope Lahle and I had once had of developing our elantry and living freely, without having to hide as we had in Kalan, has disappeared. The Maradeki despise elantry and many are suspicious of Kalani, who they think are all elantar.

As we sit on the wall, we watch the other Kalani, some of them barefoot, shuffling around the camp. There’s nothing to do. Some of the men and women have taken to clearing fallen stone from the upper levels of the city to build better shelters, but it’s impossible to work past midday. That’s when the sun forces us to bunker down in our makeshift homes, but the heat is even more oppressive in those close spaces and sometimes it feels like we can hardly breathe. We’ve asked for books, newspapers, art materials, balls or games, but our requests are rarely granted.

After each morning’s roll call, Lahle and I have taken to walking around the city’s perimeter. Sometimes we find a shady spot and look out into the forest. The trees are thick beyond the fence and sometimes we spy animals.

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Birds, mostly, but once we saw a strange creature Andras said was called a kooroo – like a hare, but one that hops on its rear legs and uses its forelegs to hold the wild taters it roots up with its sharp claws. Every day we look for this kooroo. We call her Barati, which Nisa says means friendly in Maradeki.

“Do you want to visit Nisa today?” I ask.

Nisa has been in the infirmary for the last few days, coughing up blood and unable to eat anything. Fearing infection, the guards keep us away, but we sneak in while their backs are turned. Nisa appreciates our visits – her only other company is a girl who was training to be a healer in Kalan, Ils. She’s been tasked by Tibor with bringing Nisa meals and water and attending to her needs when the doctor isn’t here. Mami has asked Ils to help at the birth, but the girl is young, only a year or two older than me, and has never seen a child born, much less assisted in the birthing.

“Not today,” Lahle says. “I have an idea.”

I roll my eyes. Lahle’s ideas are always dreadful. We’ve tried to trap lizards and rabbits, searched the whole city for secret tunnels, climbed among the rocks at the harbour looking for sea cucumbers. All we’ve earned for our efforts are bruised knees and scrapes.

“What is it this time?” I ask.

Lahle looks up. I follow her gaze, up the causeway, past the aqueducts that must have once held water but now collect dust and dead leaves that hide spiders. She’s looking beyond the broken city wall and up the steep hill to the clocktower that stands like a long shard of bone jutting out through a field of dry grass and twisted trees.

“Up there?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “Come on, it’s the one place we haven’t explored.”

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I hesitate. There’s something strange about the clocktower. Maybe it’s the cemetery out the front, or the blank unmoving face of the clock, or the long shadow it casts at sunset, like a knife bisecting the camp. It makes my skin creep to look at it.

Some of the guards like to spread stories about the tower. They say there are mages buried there and that we’ve been sent to Tartozkodik to be burned like them. Nisa says anyone who lived here wasn’t an elantir. They could no more perform an Invocation than they could fly, she said to me once, otherwise why couldn’t they control the fire that destroyed this town? She says the guards are just trying to scare us, but there is something sinister about its presence.

“You don’t believe the st0ries, do you?”

“Of course not.”

Lahle smirks. “Then why are you afraid?”

“I’m not,” I say, and then she’s running up the causeway and I have to follow. We’re not supposed to go beyond the wall, but the fenceline extends past that, into the woods on the far side of the hill. It’s only fear and superstition – and the guards – that keep people away. Lahle checks that no one’s watching before she scrambles over a low section of the wall and into the meadow. I vault after her.

It’s steep and our thin-soled shoes slither in the smooth, dusty places. We grasp at the wiry branches of the tough trees and the tussocks of long grass to pull ourselves up the roughest sections. We’re both out of breath by the time we reach the graveyard, where the headstones jut out of the ground like giant fingertips reaching up from the graves below. I try to make out the names and dates but the stones are all blackened. I look up. For a moment I think I see a silhouette, a shadow among shadows, in the big clockface, but then it’s gone.

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Lahle opens the door. One of the hinges is broken and it squeals as it judders open, scraping the stone floor. Thick layers of dust rise in spirals like ghostly forms that dissolve when struck by the light.

“Hello?” Lahle calls.

There’s no answer. There are deep shadows – the windows are layered with cobwebs. There is a high ceiling where candelabras hang, the silver congealed with blackened wax, a door and a stairwell. Lahle and I stick together as we explore, neither of us saying much. It doesn’t take long. There’s the entrance room, which looks as though it was once used for town gatherings or perhaps funeral services, and another room upstairs, where the large clockface offers a view over Tartozkodik. We run our hands over the dusty cogs, trace the radial lines marking the hours and minutes. The pulleys and ropes are frayed, the knots mouldy. There’s a small bed on a rotting timber frame, a basin with taps that whine when you turn them but produce no water, and a mildewed almanac on a three-legged stool. Back downstairs, we open the rear door and find a small room dominated by a large oven. We both recognise it for what it is. An incinerator. Lahle won’t go near it, but I open the door and look inside. Nothing but ashes. As I’m closing the door, trying not to think about the bodies that have been burned inside, I feel something tickle my ankles. A gentle current brings a wet, stale smell, and I notice a door in the floor with a large ring set in the middle.

“Lahle, look at this.”

I squat down and run my hands over the timber. I pull on the ring and the timber groans but doesn’t budge, swollen with damp and stiff from years of disuse. Lahle comes over to help me, and together we strain until the door begins to shift. At last it opens with a squeal like a pig being gutted. The space beneath is covered with old spider webs, and the skeletons of leaves and bugs are still trapped there, transparent and brittle. Lahle tears

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the webs aside, revealing a staircase that disappears into darkness. Another cold gust of air sweeps against me, bringing the moist smell again, stronger now, more caustic.

“There’s something down there,” says Lahle. “Maybe a way out. We should explore.”

I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s nothing more than a cellar. As Lahle and I consider the doorway, it seems to swell in front of me, as though opening its jaws wide to swallow me whole. I step back, the sweat cold on my skin.

“It’s dark,” I say. “We could fall and hurt ourselves.”

“I saw a lantern upstairs,” says Lahle. “We can take that.”

She’s away before I can say anything. I hear the dull echo of her footsteps in the stairway. I shuffle closer to the doorway and peer down into the darkness. What’s that sound? Is it just the wind? No. It’s more rhythmic than that. Drumming? Probably just water dripping on stone. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. That’s what Mami used to tell me when I was a little girl and afraid of going to sleep because there were nightmares that would crawl into bed with me as soon as the lights went out. She had no patience for such fantasies – Papa was the one who would come into my room with a light and inspect all the shadows until I was satisfied.

Lahle returns bearing the lantern and matches from upstairs. It sputters to life and she approaches the doorway. She hesitates. For a moment I think she’s going to change her mind, but she swallows her doubts and takes the first step, and then the second, and I follow her, equally afraid of going down and of being left behind.

The stairs are made of stone, even and well-cut, though worn at the edges. We descend in a spiral, Lahle first, holding the lamp aloft, and me close behind – so close she complains she can’t hear anything except my

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breathing. Down and down. My knees ache as the descent grows steeper, narrower, colder, and I have to brace myself against the wall with one hand. Furry growths cover the stone, thick and purple-green. They seem dull in the lamplight but when I look back I see they’re gleaming in the darkness, emitting their own weird light. I lean in to smell them – rich and earthy – and I’m tempted to stick out my tongue and taste them, but I’ve been warned of the poisonous plants around the forest. We keep going, lower and lower, until my ears seem to pinch and our footsteps are like slaps.

At last the stairwell widens and, in between the orange lashes of Lahle’s flame against the stone, I sense a new bluish tinge to the moss.

“Dim the lamp,” I say.

Lahle turns the valve down until we can both see the striations of liquid light playing across the stone. Water, then. We proceed slowly.

I feel the space open up before I see it, the deep silence interrupted by a loud drumming of water on water. Lahle raises the lamp as we emerge from the stairwell into an underground cave, a waterfall pouring from a series of pipes or openings far above into a lake. There’s an island in the middle with more pipes set into the foundations, connected to the shore by a narrow bridge of stone.

“Those must lead to the aqueducts down below,” I whisper, pointing to the pipes. My voice echoes weirdly in the empty space and I flinch at the sound. I wonder how long it’s been since human voices have been heard down here, how long since there’s been light.

Lahle isn’t listening – she’s looking up at the stone structures on top of the island. We walk down towards the water, and it’s standing there that we realise what it is. The stone is cut precisely in curved columns to form an enormous bird’s cage. Lahle opens the shutter of the lantern a little and

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the newly stoked flame sends huge shadows leaping up the walls and stalking within the island’s prison so I think I see figures there, cleaved by the stone bars, watching us.

Don’t let your imagination run away with you.

“We should go back,” I say. “Tell the guards.” But as soon as I say it I know I don’t want them down here, spoiling this place with their booted feet and erecting more fences to shut us out of the tower entirely. It’s my place now. Mine and Lahle’s.

There are a few rowboats anchored to pikes set in the stone. All the hulls are rotted through and the oars are missing.

“Should we cross?” I say, pointing to the bridge.

Lahle leads the way, holding the lamp high. The bridge is only wide enough for us to walk single file, and we take it slowly, unsure of how deep the water below is or if anything lives there. Mami has told me about some fish that can survive in lightless places like these and I find myself peering down, almost hoping to see the translucent flesh and skeletons of the kind she’s described to me, but all I can see is the yellow ululations of the lamplight on the rippled surface.

“Do you think there’s anything living down here?” I ask.

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Lahle says.

“No, it feels – ”

“Abandoned.”

“Forbidden, was what I was going to say.”

“Forbidden by who?”

“I don’t know.”

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Not forbidden, I realised. Forbidding. As though this place itself wills us away. But I don’t say this to Lahle.

When we reach the other side we realise it’s much steeper and sharper than it seems from the far shore. We find a little path with crude steps carved into the rock and follow it up. I take the lead this time, holding the lantern out in front of me. At the top of the stairs there’s a narrow lip wide enough for one person to squat between the bars and the edge of the stone. I wait for Lahle to clamber up beside me and then we hunker down and lean forward to peer through the bars. They are too narrow for us to pass through – just wide enough for an arm, a shoulder, but nothing more.

Holding the lantern in one hand, I extend the other through the bars. My fingers graze the cold stone floor and touch something round and smooth: a stone. I pick it up. Lahle takes the lantern from me. She holds it up to the bars. Only then do we see.

There are bodies bound together inside, human bodies, forming a great tree, the arms and legs chained and the faces burned to leather masks. I cry out and reel backwards. I might have fallen into the water below if Lahle hadn’t reached out and grabbed me. The lamp swings wildly, illuminating more bodies scattered around the human tree. I see ribcages cracked open, hair petrified against blackened skulls, clawed hands and feet grasping at the darkness. The wind picks up and something howls from the untouched shadows high above. Lahle pushes me to go and we run, slipping and sliding down the path and back across the bridge.

The wind dies down when we reach the shore. We pause, panting, and look back to observe the island, its prisoners invisible now. The churning of the waterfall drowns out any other sounds. My hand clenches around the stone I’m still holding, my fingers sliding over a series of ridges.

“Let’s go,” says Lahle. She can feel it too; as though by being here, we’ve woken something that was buried long ago. But as we’re about to start up

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the stairs, something catches my attention, like a voice whispering my name.

“Wait,” I say, falling back. My hand slides along the wall and finds the crevice without thinking, closing around something soft. I pull it out. It’s a leather-bound book with old pages – parchment, not the paper Papa has in his notebooks. I know it’s special as soon as I look at it. Special like my seed. It’s been waiting for us, I think. It wants us here. It wants us to know about the cave and its bodies.

“Bring it,” says Lahle. Her eyes dart from the water to the island and back towards the stairs. “We’ll look at it on the surface.”

We climb until my legs burn and I have to stop, wheezing against the wall, the mossy growths pulsing almost imperceptibly beneath my rough palms. The wind blusters up against us and I spin and stare back into the darkness but there’s nothing there, only my own harsh breathing and the low moaning of wind in narrow places. We push on against burning legs and tightening chests until we burst into the clocktower, the sudden flux of light so fierce I have to press my eyes shut. We haul the trapdoor closed, douse the lantern and abandon it on the floor.

Outside, the heat in the burned cemetery makes me queasy and I yearn to be far away. There’s too much death here, too many bodies burned and hidden, too much that’s unexplained. Could the guards’ stories be true? Could all those people be elantar? Surely not. But why else would they have been burned? Was Maradek so similar to Kalan? Could it be that cruel? Could I be even more unsafe here than I was at home? Does Papa know about this? Does anyone?

Tucked inside my pocket, the book and stone promise answers, but not here, not under the shadow of the clocktower, not standing among so many bones.

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“Let’s go back,” I say, and without waiting for Lahle’s reply, I start making my way downhill. It’s even more difficult going down but I manage to stop myself from falling and then we’re both over the city wall and walking down the causeway. We’re almost back to Lahle’s tent when Ediz comes running up to us and seizes me by the shoulder.

“Ada,” he says, his eyes darting from me to his daughter. Maybe he can smell it on us – ashes and dust. My hand slips into my pocket, protecting my new objects. “Your mother’s been looking for you. The baby is coming.”

The baby? The baby.

The book bounces against my leg as I run.

* * *

The tent smells like blood and faeces. Seda’s screaming makes my ears shrivel and my stomach clench. Thankfully, Ils bursts out of the tent before I can enter.

“You’re here!” she says. “Usra, Ada is here.”

“Have her take your place,” barks Mami from inside. I catch a glimpse of her kneeling beside Seda but then Ils pushes me away, loading me with items.

“Fill these with hot water,” she says, “and rinse out these cloths. The guards have unlocked the kitchen so you can use the stove. Bring as much as you can.”

She hands me a stack of sweat- and blood-soaked cloths and two large kettles before darting back into the tent as a fresh wave of birthing cries pierce the thick afternoon air. It’s hot – so hot I wonder how there can be any air inside – but then I hear Mami shouting at me to hurry up, so I scurry down to the kitchen to complete my tasks.

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Back and forth I go. My head throbs and my hands ache from clutching the heavy kettles. The sun bears down on the back of my neck and the glare blinds me. The caverns beneath the clocktower seem far away now – it’s as though this morning I’d briefly passed into another world. The camp is quiet as everyone waits for news of the baby. The guards don’t approach – most of them have sought shelter from the noon sun in the guardhouse. I see Tibor’s face at the window from time to time. Andras is the only one who helps me, filling the kettles with water from the kitchens, but we don’t speak, focusing on our work.

Hours pass. The sun begins to skim the mountains and the mites come out but still the baby doesn’t arrive.

“What’s going on?” I hiss at Ils through the tent flaps, but she waves me away. The next time I return, Damla is standing outside the tent, her face tight with fear and her arms wrapped around her. She’s drenched in sweat and her fingertips are bleeding where she’s gnawed her nails down to their swollen beds.

“This can’t go on,” she says in a dull voice. “Ils says the baby is stuck. She says it’s turned around the wrong way. She’s trying to fix it.”

“What can we do?” I ask. Mami appears at the tent mouth and snatches fresh cloths from me.

“Pray,” she snaps, before darting back inside.

Screams erupt from the tent and I hear Mami and Ils shouting too, but the words are unclear and I want to cover my ears.

“I can’t go back in,” says Damla. “She’s going to die. My sister is going to die.” She starts to cry and crumples to her knees, hiding her face. I kneel beside her, unsure what to say.

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“We shouldn’t have come here,” says Damla, her voice so quiet that for a moment I wonder if I’m imagining it. “It’s my fault.”

A few moments later she rises and walks back inside.

I wait for more instructions. I try not to look down the rows of people just sitting further down the street or standing on the causeway, their heads bowed. I press my fingertips to my forehead and try to massage away my headache.

The baby is born feet-first an hour later by lantern light, a pink smear between Seda’s quivering thighs. I sneak up to the tent entrance and peer through the flap. Seda makes no sound – she’s long since lost her voice. She slumps back, her arms and face limp, while Ils takes the baby. It isn’t breathing. Ils gets it in her lap, breathing into its nose and compressing its chest with two fingers. Mami and Damla are silent, just watching. Their bodies are soaked through, deflated, as though they’ve given birth themselves. The sound of Ils’s breath is loud and terrible against the baby’s chest. Its skin is grey, streaked with bloody fluid, and I can’t stand to look at its face, like withered eggplant. I look instead at the tiny fingernails on its stiff little arm, which are almost violet. I can see a thin vein in its wrist. With a shock, I realise the vein is pulsing. The baby’s fingers curl together into a fist as it screams its existence to the whole camp and, behind me, I hear cheers and laughter, even applause. I don’t realise I’ve been holding my breath until I take in a lungful of air and exhale so loudly Mami looks around and sees me crouched there. She smiles, gestures for me to come in.

I kneel beside her and we all lean forward to peer down at the baby, which is now flushing a deep red. After its first cries it quiets and sucks on Ils’s thumb. There’s a slick of dark hair pasted to its head that Mami touches with one reverent finger. Ils wraps the baby in a fresh, dry cloth and turns to hand it to Seda.

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She’s pale and still. There’s a tranquillity about the eyes, half-closed and unblinking, despite the two freshly clotted gashes in the dry white bed of her lower lip where she’s chewed right through. Her right arm is extended, the fingers splayed, as though reaching for the child. Her body, which had so recently heaved with new life, no longer moves. Not even to breathe.

“It’s a girl,” whispers Ils, holding the baby close. Damla reaches out and grasps Seda’s hand, shaking it, shaking her whole arm, then her shoulders. I crawl away to slump against one of the timber uprights of the tent, the heels of my hands pressed against my eyes to stop the world swimming.

The night is silent in the lengthening shadows. The bell for the evening roll call is tolling outside.

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USRA

Damla names the baby Seda, as all the firstborn women in her family have been named for generations. The mother’s body is taken to the infirmary wrapped in a sheet. In the morning Damla and I go to wash the body and pray for Seda but Nisa, through fits of coughing, says the guards took it away in the night to bury it somewhere outside the camp in an unmarked grave.

We can find no words to redress this unspeakable sacrilege. The body needs to be blessed so Seda can find her way to Nura, who waits for the light she brings. Damla shakes silently while I try to speak with Tibor, but he says he doesn’t know where the body is buried and even if he did he would not take us there to pray. He says we have no right to worship the gods of mages in Maradek. He doesn’t offer any condolences. He doesn’t realise this is all his fault. If the child had been born with the help of midwives, if Seda’s heart condition had been treated properly by a healer…

Ils approaches Tibor while we stand, numb with anger. She says Baby Seda must go to the city with Damla but Tibor says only the baby will go and that Damla will not be able to join her niece unless her application for citizenship is approved. I try to maintain a level head, for the baby, but our grief runs hot and I make no effort to stop her when she attacks Tibor with her fists. It takes three men and a broken tooth to prise her off them. They drag Damla to the infirmary and lock her in with Nisa and Ils, and they shout at me to look after the child for the night. As I’m walking back to the tent with the hungry newborn wailing in my arms, one of the guards follows me and spits his poison words at us until we’re safely inside my tent. This is your fault. You bring your black magic here and our ancestors punish you by taking your lives.

Could he be right?

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I rock the baby all night, thinking back to when I had my own newborn. But this one is nothing like Ada. This one is small and withered. Ada had been thin, yes, but there was strength in the grip of her hand on my thumb and the pull of her mouth at my nipple. This child is weak. I slip the tip of my pinkie into its mouth and it tries to suckle for milk but its mouth slides away and its head lolls, its dark eyes rolling. Even its cries are weak. I rock her back and forth and tell her that her mother loves her.

In the morning, the guards let Damla out of the infirmary and she takes the baby from me. It doesn’t want her. It reaches for me with its stunted limbs, its face scarlet and its voice shrill. She gives the baby back to me and we sit in the shade of the infirmary, pressing water to its lips, but it won’t take any. I wonder if it will die. It hasn’t eaten, it hasn’t slept.

When the supply dirigible arrives in the afternoon, I can’t bear to give the baby to Andras, who is tasked with delivering it to a wet nurse at the city’s orphan house. Damla has a determined look on her face when she wrenches the child from my arms, but then she, too, is shaking her head, no no no. Ils is the one who takes the starving little thing from Damla’s arms and passes it to Andras. Damla and I hold each other as Andras carries the baby on board. Neither of us has washed since Seda’s death and we reek of blood and grief. The dirigible rises and disappears behind the curve of the mountains, leaving us standing in the courtyard looking up at the empty sky.

Ils takes Damla back to the infirmary. Ada takes me by the arm and leads me back to the tent. It seems too large and quiet without Seda’s swollen body or Damla’s busy hands. We don’t touch the bed. The sheets are crumpled, with large rust-coloured stains blossoming in arbitrary patterns that remind me of Ada’s watercolour paintings as a child.

I sit with my hands under my thighs, chewing the inside of my cheek until my mouth fills with blood. I swallow it down, swallow and swallow. I can’t

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stop gulping. My hands are throbbing. I put them in my lap. They begin to twitch. I look for something for them to do but there’s nothing. I clasp them together, squeezing until I’m sure the bones will break.

“Mami,” Ada says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?” I shrug her off and lie down, tucking my hands between my thighs. Ada lies down on her own sleeping mat.

I wish I still had Pitr’s letters. I had managed to put all the reasons we came here to the back of my mind while there was an immediate task at hand – to bring Seda’s baby into the world. Without that work my thoughts begin to itch, and the itching spreads to my hands. I scratch at them furiously.

Why did we leave home? For water? But the drought has followed us here. We’re still thin and scared, thirsty and sick. We could die here. We could die and no one would know. We should not have left. We should have waited. Pitr said he would come home if he couldn’t bring us to Maradek. I should have trusted him, no matter what.

Pitr, I think. We will see him soon. We will be together. This is just the in- between. It will come to an end and we’ll be safe. But I don’t believe it. I don’t think I ever did.

I find myself longing for the terrible dreams. I want them to swallow me whole. I want the darkness inside me to rise up and drown me. There is no light on the surface of things – I see that now. I lie still and wait for sleep and when it comes I sink down into the depths of the dark. Perhaps there is quiet there.

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ADA

That night the dreams are even worse. I’m back in Kalan, toiling in the desert, raking the dirt with my fingers to uncover bones. Mami is there, and Seda, and Damla, and Lahle too, but not Papa. We pull those bones from the dust, one by one, and carry them to a great pile, where faceless men in black cloaks build them into one great skeleton that moves with a will of its own. It begins to hunt us down and eat us, and the bones form new limbs with which to reach out and take fresh kills. We search the desert in a frenzy, looking for more bones to offer in place of our own.

When I wake I lie still, holding myself, digging my fingernails into the soft flesh of the backs of my arms and gnawing my lip until it bleeds. I relish it – this physical pain, this trickle of blood, is real. Beside me, Mami thrashes in her sleep, her nails raking at the skin on her hands. It’s all red-raw and peeling. I try to wake her but she flings an arm out, catching me on the face, and I stumble outside for air.

The moon is high above me, dawn still hours away. I know I won’t be able to sleep again. I peer down the row of tents. There’s no movement, although a light wind murmurs other’s dream-speech to me – curses, moans, half-swallowed pleas.

I can still feel the book in my pocket, resting against my thigh. I work it out of my pouch. The stone has slipped inside the front cover and I set it on the ground while I open the book to the first page. There is the faint suggestion of a border, floral, perhaps, and indentations where images once surrounded the text, but all the ink is gone, washed away, leaving only vague stains.

Moonlight pools on the page. Golden threads weave their way across the furrowed parchment and words appear, as though freshly inked: The Book of Invocations. I read the words lilting across the page in moonlight penstrokes:

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An Invocation of Memory

Flesh suffers wounds

But thought too is flayed with frantic devotion

If tongue and hands are cut away

Think these words

And imagine them as a body

Untouched and growing

From what is severed

Begins

The light engulfs my hand, my arm, my head. A door of light opens and I step through into the memory.

* * *

The nightshade lay on top of the table next to her father’s mortar and pestle, waiting to be ground up and turned to purple pigments. Dora knew she was not allowed to touch it but she squirmed in her mother’s lap, trying to get a closer look. Her father worked with many dangerous plants and chemicals to make the colours he needed for his paintings and illustrations, and though she’d learned as a baby not to touch any of them or put them in her mouth, this had only piqued her curiosity. Her mother, recognising her fascination, had tried to redirect it into making botanical studies but she did not yet have the skill to render things accurately. Still, her father said she had promise and supplied her with all the materials she needed, saying one day she would become his assistant and later take over the workshop on her own. That was a long way off though. Her father was still a young man and he had many important commissions, despite the recent purges.

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Dora’s father had been grinding up the nightshade in his workshop on the second floor of their narrow house when the knock came. Dora and her mother were in the kitchen, preparing supper, and Dora’s father came down in his gloves, set aside the plant in its stone bowl, and opened the door to see the man standing there, his grey cloak fastened with a crown- of-thorns pin at the throat, glinting in the yellow light from the street lamps.

Dora’s father offered him a seat and instructed Dora’s mother to bring tea. Dora’s mother’s hands shook when she laid out the teapot and cups. She managed to pour without incident, but when the visitor asked for milk it splashed over the rim and pooled in the saucer. She apologised, red-faced, but he swatted her away and tipped the milk into his mouth before swallowing the rest of the tea in one noisy drink. Dora wondered how it didn’t scald his throat. Dora’s father glanced at his wife and she refilled the cup before retreating to the corner seat, pulling Dora into her lap.

The man had an ill-fitting face, as though it was disconnected from the rest of his body. His cheeks were pitted and wrinkled, and his eyebrows seemed to sprout from his slumping eyes like wild clematis. He had a thin beard and very full lips he kept moistening with a tongue that, she had noticed, was almost the same colour as the nightshade. His body was lean, stiff – he maintained perfect posture as he took the second cup in his gloved hands and slurped noisily.

“We hear you have a new commission,” said the man without introducing himself.

“I have several new commissions,” admitted Dora’s father, his voice even and pleasant. The man’s eyes narrowed at this and his tongue lashed out, sweeping across the thin moustache on his upper lip like a scythe.

“We’re interested in the Book of Invocations,” he said. “Bartal approached you last month with the designs, did he not?”

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“Yes,” said Dora’s father. “But it is merely a prayer book. He did not call it a Book of Imputations.”

“Invocations,” spat the man.

“What are invotations?” said Dora’s father.

“Never mind what it’s called! You have it, yes?”

“Bartal’s book? It seemed harmless to me,” said Dora’s father, sipping his own tea.

“That is for me to decide,” said the man, and Dora knew then that he was one of the fanatikus come to assess her father’s work; her father was playing dumb, trying to protect his family. She trembled and her mother held her tighter, her fingers digging into Dora’s sides. She squirmed but Dora’s mother only gripped her tighter.

“Where is it?” the man insisted.

“I don’t have the book,” lied Dora’s father. Dora had seen it just this morning, the illustrations laid out ready for binding, her father working on the final pages of calligraphy. She did not know what they contained, only that the images were very beautiful, decorated with her father’s favourite colours – lapis and gold – and that he had taken special care with the lettering.

“Then where is it now?”

“I finished it this morning. I sent it to Bartal.”

At this the man smiled and a slippery look came over his face.

“But Bartal is in our custody,” said the man, “and has been the last week.” He drained his teacup and dropped it back on the table with a clatter. Dora’s father reached forward to take up his own cup and the man’s hand darted out and closed around his wrist.

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“The book contains explicit instructions,” he said, his voice softening so Dora’s mother leaned forward to hear, crushing Dora in her lap. “Means by which piszok can sneak into our dreams and implant evil thoughts to corrupt us.”

“I only transcribed the text,” said Dora’s father. “I did not write it.”

“But you know its contents.”

“They seemed innocent to me. Not instructions. More like poetry or, as I said, prayer.”

The man tightened his grip around Dora’s father’s wrist – Dora saw him wince. “Not only our dreams. These invocations contain the means to control others’ bodies, others’ thoughts. They intend to make us puppets. Slaves.”

“That is, as you said, for yourself to decide,” admitted Dora’s father. “But the book is no longer here.”

“You have it,” insisted the man, twisting the wrist so Dora’s father was forced to his feet with a gasp. The man released him, and he fell back in his chair, rubbing his wrist, anger kindling in his dark eyes. Dora had rarely seen that look before but she knew to be careful when she did. Her father was slow to anger but quick to action when that fierce light took him.

“You will show me to your workshop and allow me to inspect it,” said the man, “or you will be arrested and sent to the lock-up with Bartal and the rest of the piszok, and this house will be burned down.”

There was nothing to be done. Dora’s father stood and led the way upstairs to the workshop. Dora and her mother stayed in the room, straining to hear anything – arguments, a scuffle, tearing and rending of pages. But there were only their footsteps creaking on the floorboards.

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“What’s happening?” asked Dora, but her mother hushed her and moved to the bottom of the stairs, straining with her whole body to hear, her weight on her toes.

“As I said, it’s not here.” Dora’s father’s voice drifted down to them. Dora, clinging to her mother’s knees, could hear the shuffling of papers and books, the clink of ink bottles and paint tins.

Not here? But where had it gone? Dora tugged at the hem of her mother’s shift. She was ignored.

There were several thuds – the man must be overturning books – and then a louder crash that shook the ceiling and made the tea things rattle on their table next to the fire. Dora felt her mother’s knees trembling. The man had overturned her father’s desk in anger.

“Where did you send it?”

“To Bartal, as I said.”

“Who took it?”

“One of Bartal’s messengers came for it. He didn’t return.”

“What was the messenger’s name?”

“I didn’t think to ask. He was only a messenger.”

The man hissed, and the sound was like water pouring over a flame. There was another thud, softer this time, and the sound of scuffling feet. More breaking glass. Dora’s mother braced herself against the wall, her hand covering her mouth.

“You know the piszok are to be expelled from the city,” said the man. He had allowed his voice to rise and his words were clear, could probably even be heard on the street. Perhaps that was his intent, thought Dora, to

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spread fear, to defame their family and their business. “It’s no good protecting them.”

Dora’s father didn’t respond.

“We would offer you a tremendous reward. You were an apprentice at the karzat, weren’t you? Before you married beneath you. Your wife was a maid, wasn’t she? A servant bitch.”

At this Dora’s father growled and there was the sound of a scramble, another thud.

“You deserve better,” said the man, slightly out of breath. “Give us the book and we will reinstate you as an artist-resident. You can keep your wife and that whelp of a child. You’d be wealthy. Think of the opportunities you’d have. You could produce the finest books. Not these . . . trinkets.”

There was no response. Dora imagined her father lying on the floor, injured, unable to speak.

“We will find the book,” said the man, “and if you’ve been keeping it from us you will be held responsible.”

Footsteps creaked at the top of the stairs. Dora and her mother resumed their places in the corner chair, but when the man entered the room he didn’t spare them a glance. He rearranged his cloak around his shoulders and fixed the pin securely at his throat. Dora’s father stumbled down after him. His temple was blushing a deep plum, and there was a small cut high on the cheekbone. His hands were soaked with ink and he picked a piece of glass from the flesh of his palm, throwing it into the fire.

“If you do not procure the book for us, you’ll be banished from the city as well,” said the man. He had one hand on the doorknob, his back turned but his words clear in the small room. It was getting cold – the fire needed more wood. “Think of my offer. Make the right decision.”

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With that he was gone, leaving the door open. Once he’d disappeared out into the street Dora’s mother hurried across the room and pulled it closed. Dora’s father slumped into his chair by the fire.

“Where is it?” he asked. His eyes were on Dora’s mother. She pulled up the hem of her dress to reveal the pages, neatly tucked into her girdle. She pulled them out and handed them to Dora’s father, who rifled through them, satisfying himself that they were all present.

“I snatched them when I went to fetch the tea,” she said. “It was all I could think to do.”

“You did beautifully,” said Dora’s father, standing and embracing her.

“Where will we go?” said Dora. Mother and father turned to look at her. “We can’t stay, can we?”

“No,” said Dora’s father. He sat down and opened his arms for her. She climbed into his lap. Dora’s mother sat across from them. She pushed away the cup the man had used with distaste. “This book is precious, not least because of you, little one. Bartal says there is a place in the mountains where he hopes we can all start again. He wants to make a true artist’s society, where people can think and make and do as they wish.”

Dora raised a hand to touch her father’s temple. He winced away but she kept her hand there and began to hum the songs she knew, the healing songs, that would knit the fibres together, reduce the inflammation, redistribute the clotted blood. Her hand came away and the wound was healed. She began work on the cut on his cheek.

“What about Bartal?” said Dora’s mother. She picked up the nightshade, turning it to and fro, one finger tracing the bell-like blooms.

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“I think Nikolasz lied. Bartal has been planning to leave for some time. He knew they would come for him. I’m sure they don’t have him, and they won’t get this book either.”

Nikolasz. Dora mouthed the name to herself, feeling out the sharp edges of it. He thought her beneath his notice, but her father had always told her she was worthwhile, and shouldn’t be ashamed of her elantry. It was a gift, he said, a beautiful gift, to heal people, to work with energy.

“What of this new place?” said Dora’s mother, setting aside the flowers. “Where is it?”

“Tartozkodik,” said Dora’s father. “It’s only small. But Bartal says there will be no segregation, no condemning, as fanatikus like our friend Nikolasz would have us do. He says many piszok are already living there. It is they who wrote this book. I do not understand much of it, but I know it is your future.”

At this he caught Dora’s hand against his cheek and took it in both of his hands, pressing his forehead against hers. “New kinds of art. People who appreciate your abilities, who don’t fear them and abhor you. We have to protect it.” Protect you. Dora heard the unspoken words that lingered in the quiet room. She looked at the pages in her father’s lap, the gold ink glowing in the dimming firelight, the elegant letters forming words she couldn’t yet read.

They sat quietly for a long time, letting the hearth dwindle. It was long past Dora’s bedtime when they rose and slipped away in the night, leaving an overturned workshop, a pot of cold tea and the ashes in the fireplace.

* * *

Dora pulled her cloak around her as she hurried up Tartozkodik’s causeway towards her father’s workshop. A strong wind was coming in off the sea and there would be a storm tonight. She felt it coming – the earth

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tightening beneath her feet, the trees hunkering down. Others pushed and shoved as they made their preparations to leave before the guards came or the storm hit, loading packs on donkeys, wrapping their children in their traveling clothes, preparing carts or litters for the old and the sick. This was all too familiar. It had only been ten years since they’d last packed and fled in the night like this, not knowing where to go, not knowing how they’d survive. Now here they were again, making their preparations to flee into the deep mountain passes.

She collided with a man carrying a sack of meal and almost fell but managed to catch herself against the stone wall of the aqueduct. She scrambled up on to the ledge and ran along the top, unchecked, until she reached the street she was looking for. Here, she leaped down and darted between people and animals, carts and bags. When she reached the door of her father’s workshop she saw the windows had been flung open and furniture, books, clothes, papers and bottles of ink lay strewn and broken in the street. She heard angry voices – her father, and another man she didn’t recognise. She crept round the side of the house, through the pavilion hanging with untreated goat hide where her father made his own parchment, and then to the back, where her mother kept a small herb garden. She crawled up to the back window, crushing sage and lemongrass underfoot. Usually she enjoyed the scents but today they made her feel sick. She peered through the glass into the painting room, where she and her father worked on illustrations. Her father was sitting in a chair and two, no, three men stood in front of him. She knew immediately they were not from Tartozkodik – they were of the fanatikus; one had abandoned his cloak to reveal the thorn pin at his collar – and she knew, then, that it was too late. Even now she thought she could hear the drone of propellers and imagined their skyships landing, the men swarming the mountains and killing everyone who didn’t surrender. They had no weapons here, despite what the fanatikus believed. No weapons and no will to war.

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“Where is it?”

There was more grey in his hair and he had begun to stoop a little, but she recognised those eyebrows, the purple tongue slipping through the bared teeth. Nikolasz. He was holding one of her father’s painting knives, dull but sharp enough if its handler’s intent was keen.

“I don’t have it anymore,” said Dora’s father. He had a gash above his eye and was breathing heavily. Dora worried – his lungs were weak. He’d recently had to stop travelling into the mountains to find the leaves and berries for the blue and green pigments he loved so dearly. He had given the task to her.

“Liar,” hissed Nikolasz. He took a step closer and the others pulled her father’s arms back, baring his breast, his throat.

“Best speak now,” said one of them. “Is a book worth all this?”

“Think of your family,” said the other. “If you don’t tell us where it is, we’ll persuade your wife. Or your daughter.”

“They’re already gone,” lied Dora’s father. He licked his lips, looking straight at Nikolasz. At this Nikolasz laughed and clicked his fingers, and Dora had to cram her face against her forearm to stifle her cry because a fourth fanatikus appeared, leading her mother, bound and gagged, into the workroom. Her clothes were distressed, her hair escaping from its braid. One of the guards stepped away from Papa and looked out the rear window to scan the garden. Dora pressed herself into the wall, her hand over her mouth.

“What is it?” hissed Nikolasz.

“Thought I heard something.”

“It’s just the wind,” spat the man restraining Dora’s father. “Help me hold him. When you start twisting the knife they squirm like eels.” She heard

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the fanatikus move away from the window, the grating of the chair legs on the floorboards as they repositioned her father. Dora peeped over the window sill. Nikolasz had stepped forward and the knife was pressed against her father’s throat. She bit down on her tongue to keep from crying out.

“Wait,” gasped Dora’s father. Nikolasz eased back, just enough to allow her father to turn his head a little, to raise his voice so he knew he was speaking to her. It was the tone he always used when instructing her in calligraphy or bookbinding.

“The book is gone. It lies well beyond your reach now and time itself would not reveal it to you, for you are beneath its notice.”

She knew, then, where it was. Nikolasz growled and lunged at her father and she spun away, kneeling in the herb garden, covering her ears, pressing her face into the soil and swallowing the smells of lemon and mint. Still, she heard her mother’s screams, the scuffle of the chair, the grunts of her father’s captors as they held his body down. She imagined the blood dribbling across the floor, like the crimson gash of ink spilled across an untainted page.

She could not bear to stay until the end. Her mother was screaming as Nikolasz instructed his men to bring her to him. She would die, too. Dora knew she could do nothing. She knew what her father wanted her to do. She crawled through the garden and back out onto the street, covering herself with her cloak, cramming her fist into her mouth and biting down. There was soil in her mouth, soil between her teeth. She spat it out as she ran down the street back towards the main stairway. She looked down and saw the fanatikus in the harbour marching out of three skyships, carrying torches, metal glinting in their hands. The townsfolk were running, falling, dropping their burdens as they tried to escape.

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She turned away and began to climb uphill towards the clocktower. She would retrieve the book and disappear into the forest. Perhaps her father had seen this coming – perhaps that’s why he’d insisted she learn about the forest’s plants and insects under the guise of sourcing the best materials for pigments. She could survive there for a long time. She knew where the clean water was, she knew the berries that were safe to eat, the best places to hide. She was a healer – she would stay strong and healthy. She’d find others.

She was almost at the city wall. The meadow’s long grass might hide her. The wind whipped against her and made her eyes tear but she ran on, half- blind. Behind her there were shouts, and someone grabbed her wrist. She threw them off and leapt upwards, but others were seizing her ankles and she was slipping, tumbling down into cold, rough hands. She thought she smelled blood.

* * *

Dora’s bones ached. She shifted restlessly on the thin mattress in the caretaker’s room beneath the scaffolding of the clock’s machinery. She could hear steps approaching. The door was thrown open and Nikolasz appeared. She did not rise. Her cheeks and tongue were so swollen she could not speak. She pressed her face against the pillow – straw and dust. Nikolasz came and stood over her, and she heard the thud of the collar and then the clink of pincers and tongs. She closed her eyes against them. Nikolasz spoke in a soft voice that could almost be mistaken as kind.

“Where is the book?”

When it was over and she had spat out the blood and wadded up a corner of the sheet to press against the fresh hole in her mouth, she slid one hand beneath the mattress and brought out the stone. Using a small screw she’d found, she began etching a fresh line on the surface, seventeen lines for seventeen days.

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Later, she managed to stumble to the sink and splash her face with water, rinse out her mouth. She had no energy to heal herself. She was too tired, too grief-stricken. She looked out the window. The town was silent and still. She could see the wreckage from the invasion strewn about the village: overturned carts, the glitter of broken glass on the streets, and the burned out remains of Bartal’s home down near the harbour, as though someone had stamped out that part of the city with a big black boot. She had been taken up to the tower and imprisoned there, forced to watch through the window as the rest of them were herded down into the caves below.

She slept well that night. She saw her mother and father in a dream. They were sowing a field but when she walked down the rows she saw they had planted pages from the book, the tips of the paper sticking out of the earth like pale weeds.

The very next day Nikolasz came again. Usually there were longer periods between the interrogations, but this time he did not even enter the room. He was accompanied by a large man Dora did not recognise.

“You will be taken down to the holding area,” said Nikolasz from the doorway, “until the judgement.”

That was it. Her mouth was too swollen to form words and she was weak. She was relieved, in a way, that she wouldn’t be alone. The man threw her over his shoulder and they descended.

* * *

There was no light; just the constant pounding of water on water. She was flung in and caged, and the wind and water filled her head so she had to press her hands to her ears to keep them out. They made her teeth throb. The others questioned her but no one had any answers. Together they

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wondered when the final judgement would come and how terrible it might be.

* * *

They were turned to shadows, the piszok whose words her father had set down in his best ink and parchment. They were bones arranged in a caged scene, calcified, their hair brackish weeds and the skin drooping in patterns that reminded Dora of mud puddles.

It was a slow starvation – light, water, food. She began to see things. Pink clouds in the black depths and a sunrise there, mirrored but out of focus in the churning. We’re the wrong way up, she said. We have to turn things back around. But no one could help her so she just stared out between the bars and imagined herself sinking and soaring until she was dizzy and had to press her forehead to the cold stone floor and close her eyes.

More scenes: she reached out her hands and tried to catch the drops of blood she saw falling from somewhere up in the darkness, and where they touched her skin – on her arms, on her face, in her hair – red flowers bloomed, rooting themselves beneath the skin and intertwining with her veins. They were the same shade of red her father used for the fruit vines in the borders of the book – the pomegranates, so ripe on the page you could practically taste the juice. The flowers withered but she could still feel the tendrils curling round her organs, looking for the right place to set down and grow.

She started to see shapes differently. They were all layered on top of each other and vibrating so sometimes an image came into focus and other times they jangled against each other and she had to shut her eyes against the offensive conjugations.

The last, most troubling distortion: words floated on pieces of ash that she reached out to catch even as the veins and roots inside her shrivelled and

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melted away. The fire rose as she closed her eyes. The smoke smothered her first; she was glad she did not have to burn. She thought she heard her father’s voice.

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ADA

The light fades and Dora’s memories slide away from me, leaving me holding the book she left behind. I realise I’m still holding the stone in my other hand and I turn it over to see the seventeen lines etched in its surface. My hand fumbles in the pouch I always keep with me now and closes around the seed. I set the three items on the ground in front of my folded legs: seed, book, stone.

It’s still dark but dawn isn’t far off. After the dark solitude of Dora’s final days in the cave under the clocktower, even the clouded moonlight seems blinding. I think I can hear Dora’s voice whispering the words of the invocations in my ear – the things she’d died to preserve. Was one book worth so very much? She could’ve saved herself. Maybe, if she’d given it to the fanatikus... But she hadn’t wanted to. I understood that. She’d wanted to preserve this knowledge for other elantar, she wanted the book to carry not only the invocations but also the memory of the purges, the flight to the sea and then the burning. Had she foreseen the book would come to someone like me? Someone who’d be able to read it long after the ink had faded and mould had begun to eat away the paper? No – that was just sentimental. She’d wanted to live. She was afraid. There was no certainty, only hope. The hope her father had given her: a new start, a different life where there could be new kinds of art.

The camp looks different now. Perhaps I’m sitting where Dora once crouched while the fanatikus killed her father. Perhaps her body is the one I’d touched when I found the stone in the cage under the clocktower. Perhaps this place is cursed. Not with black magic but with a ghostly trauma that resides in the stone and the grass and the creak of the boughs at the forest’s edge. I know now why they burned the place – they tried to bleach the ghost-memory from the town so it would be forgotten and a new history could be laid down, like whitewashing a canvas so another image could be painted on top. Papa used to do this all the time.

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Sometimes he would let something of the old image come through in the new, and the painting was caught between past and present, between one thought and another. I was intrigued by this, but found it disturbing too, as though all things were happening at once. That’s what this book was like. That’s what it had shown me. The past is always visible. Fire can’t destroy memory.

I open the book again and turn each page slowly, reading each of the invocations written there in gilded light. So many kinds. For healing, for rain, for harvest, for dreaming.

For dreaming.

My fingers linger on the page and trace the words written there. I have an idea, but I’ll need Lahle’s help.

* * *

I find her, stumbling from her tent and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her gaze sharpens as I grab her elbow and pull her along, out of earshot of Ediz and Emre.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Tonight,” I say, “after dark. Can you slip away? Wait until your father and uncle are asleep and meet me in the tower.”

“All right,” she says, darting a glimpse back behind her. “But why do we have to wait? Why can’t you show me now?”

“We can’t risk getting caught. The book – ”

“You saw something, didn’t you?”

I drag her towards the causeway as her father stumbles through the arch of the laneway where their tent is pitched.

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“Tonight,” I say, “after dark. I’ll show you everything.”

* * *

I don’t realise until nightfall that it’s the full moon – Volta’s moon, waxing pink, like the petal of some beautiful flower pressed into the dark blue page of the sky. The red dreaming light stains the whole city. Lahle finds me in the upper room of the clocktower, the machinery projecting pink geometries on our skin. I leave Lahle alone with the book while I sit in the curve of the clockface, my knees tucked up, my chin resting on top, looking down at the waves crashing against the shore like foaming blood. When she’s finished she calls my name softly and I come over and sit beside her.

We piece together the rumours we’ve heard from the guards with what the book can tell us. Elantar had lived in a Maradeki ghetto a hundred years ago, keeping their meagre magic to themselves. No one outside the ghetto would deal with them. They were forbidden to leave the ghetto, even when it flooded. They were forbidden to create art. But they’d survived. They’d learned. And they’d dreamed, too, of a better place, somewhere of their own. Not a ghetto. A city where they could use their magic to create new works of art. One elantir began to set down her magic in words. This was the beginning of the Book of Invocations – the basis from which she sought to build elantric knowledge. She passed the task of collecting and writing down the invocations to her son, Bartal. The Maradeki elantar had discovered many things and recorded them in the book, including new ways of exchanging energy and thought as a form of art. When news of their work spread to the city, the fanatikus formed from the city guard – the Maradeki equivalent of the Hand – and drove the elantar north, out of the city and into the forest. But the elantar had thrived there. They’d settled in an abandoned fishing village and built a town out of good stone and wood. Far from the city, they were free to develop the invocations, add to the book and perform their own ceremonies for new works of art. Dora had been happy there, so happy she sometimes wasn’t afraid. But it hadn’t

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been enough. The fanatikus had come again, determined to eradicate the last of the elantar – a great purge, they said, to purify Maradek. After the burning, they’d left the town to be cleansed through heat and rain and silence, and the stories of evil piszok who poisoned all life with their black magic were told at night to scare their children into abhorrence of elantry and to persecution of all those who practised it.

“Here,” I say, turning to the page of the invocation I’m most interested in. Lahle’s fingers graze the pages drenched in the blushing shadow of the dreaming-moon and, under her touch, silvery threads unfurl on the page – the words of the Dreaming Invocation.

Dreams dissolve into red light-flux, and in the spectrum of the blood moon, hear them sing and sing such a tangled song.

We shape the Dreaming Invocation by thought; there is no need for words. The moonlight stretches the room to infinite proportions. I think I hear Dora’s voice. No, not hear. It’s as though messages are being transmitted on rays of moonlight. The Invocation dissolves all the figures in the room and within the words there’s a rhythm. I ride the waves of it, lurching along in its grasp, and the pattern of those words is mimicked in striations of light falling across the clockface, the floor, our bodies.

The room shifts around us and becomes a series of waves composed of light and whispered words, humming. Lahle and I come adrift from our bodies as everything is reduced to a series of vibrations, of frequencies that roll out and back, out and back, sometimes morphing into temporary patterns. It makes me think of the echolocatory systems of bats Papa has

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told me about. I can single out Lahle’s frequencies – they have a particular rhythm, a tenor – but there are more; my own, and others, older and fainter, as though they came from a great distance or through some disturbance. The waves collide with each other, rippling through me and sending fresh patterns ricocheting around the room. I can feel Dora in those points of contact, sense her dark eyes and the fingers stained with her father’s inks, smelling of vellum. I reach out to touch her in the vibrations that still resonate here in the clocktower, tracing the edges of her like a topographical map. I gasp as Dora’s wavelengths surround my body, wracking me with tremors, submerging me in brief but intense impressions – of loneliness, a cold solitude I’ve never known before – and then I’m dispelled in a series of fresh echoes, waves crashing on waves, and the ripples ooze out and disappear in Volta’s light.

I find a new frequency and follow it along until I’m riding Lahle’s wavelengths, so fast they’re almost humming. She feels me, too – I can tell, through a series of accelerating pulsations along my frequency. There is a rapid exchange of emotions – wonder, fear, exultation at our new discovery, the power of the invocation. We experiment, pulling back and forth, weaving in and out, revelling in the joyful experience of tangled sensation.

The tone of Lahle’s signals changes, and I sense she’s trying to get my attention, to shift my focus to something else. We spread outwards, from the tower down the hill to the camp, and I sense the complex web of wavelengths simmering there. Together we reach out to sample them, letting them thrum against us. I can sense Mami and Damla, but I don’t stop to investigate because there’s something larger, some underlying rhythm that connects each individual. The pulsations are erratic, quickening to a painful pitch, and then falling away to nothing, so there are long periods of silence that leave me cut adrift and aching, before building again to swift jabs that knock me back and disorient me. I’m trying to find

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the source, searching among all the threads, mapping out the points of connection, when I feel Lahle signalling me again. Ada. Look. She singles out a low tone and distils it until it’s the only signal, and then she emits a single pitch that rings throughout the camp. I feel it echo deep in my belly. The bad dreams.

Now I can see the seething thread, red and angry. Wherever it collides with another’s wavelengths, there are spikes and troughs that ripple out and shape all other frequencies, building to a fever pitch that rings through the dreams of everyone I touch.

I follow one of these threads – a tremulous note that stings when it crescendos and then dies away to a guttural hum. I trace that note down to the infirmary and find Damla there in the agitated pulsations of light. Images come in and out of focus through the pulsations, illuminated by the red moon, and echo back to me on the waves of the invocation.

They reveal Damla’s dream-images. She’s in the forest, searching for her sister’s grave and carrying the crying new baby in her arms. She knows she’s buried her sister here somewhere but she can’t find her way back to the grave. Everything will be all right if she can only find Seda. She searches and searches, juggling the shrieking infant, until at last she stumbles across the stone she’s placed on top of the freshly turned soil as a grave marker. She falls to her knees and begins shoving clods of earth into the baby’s mouth to stop it crying. The baby’s mouth is wide open, trying to breathe, and its screams are muffled by wet earth until it falls silent and still. Damla turns away from the grave and sees her sister standing there, clutching the child, watching her, and she begins to cry, for she realises then that it’s her own mouth she’s been cramming the soil into, her own grave she’s sitting in, pouring the earth in on top of herself, drowning in the forest’s depths.

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Now that I’m aware of the restlessness of the frequencies, I begin to work on calming them. I imagine concentric rings of light emanating from the clocktower and washing over the camp, and the dissonant frequencies diminish and morph into smooth tidal flows. Like pieces of sediment, new images wash up against me, soaked with red light.

I see Nisa and a daughter she’d never spoken of in a garden, pulling up yams and other roots, laughing; I see water on Ils’s face – she was born in a rare rainfall and the midwife had said she’d be blessed all her life; and last, I see Damla again, submerged in shadows, shards of Volta’s light spiralling down towards her, penetrating the depths.

As I drift through the layers of light and sound, guided along the frequencies of the invocation, I begin to understand what’s happening. The Dreaming Invocation reveals the web of unconscious connections that exist between people at the same time as it reveals their dreams. The words of the invocation provide a basic structure, like an imaginary architecture, for perceiving the flux of psychic energies within the camp.

I wonder how much further the Dreaming Invocation can spread. I search the tangle of threads that spread out from my centre and fix on one that spins out across the forest and plunges away on spirals of red light that resonate with a familiar tonality. I know where it leads before I see him there.

My father is sitting in his studio, labouring over an immense new work. I recognise him as a series of dissonant tones that weave through his art. They clang together, creating serrated lines of light that drown out all other frequencies, and I know the work is still unresolved. Images swim up through the places where his frequencies overlap the artwork’s and I understand that he is making this art for me. At its centre, which is also his, lies a space, a void, in which darkness condenses until it draws the

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entirety of the invocation towards it and I feel as though I am being pulled into a black hole. Suddenly, I realise what belongs there.

I let the frequencies slither away, and the light recedes, pulling back until I can feel myself within the clocktower again. I wade through the reverberations until I find what I’m looking for. The seed’s frequencies are slower and subtler than a human’s, but they pulse with light that imbues the spaces between human frequencies with a soothing radiance.

I sense the moment that I depart from the invocation and begin to create my own. There are no words yet. Just intent. I begin weaving together the seed’s wavelengths with the human dream-images flowing towards me on Volta’s red light, stringing them together in fluid lines that glisten pink and silver. Lahle senses what I’m doing and joins me, weaving her own lines together with mine. The lines begin to flow into the seed and when it’s full it glistens crimson and begins to grow.

Roots flow out from the clocktower and down into the camp. Its branches gather together all the frequencies and knit them together in a living network that connects us all. The branches extend towards the moon and catch the echoes of the stars, and those rays of light also reverberate through the invocation. Leaves made of new light, carrying the dreaming- images limned in silver, unfurl like fingers.

It’s over too quickly. The room solidifies around me again. Brick walls, metal cogs, Lahle’s flesh. We stand together by the window, looking down at the slumbering camp. The new knowledge I’ve gained through experimenting with the dreaming invocation courses through me. I know now – elantry can create, not just destroy. Elantry is art. The kind of art Dora and the other Maradeki elantar had dreamed of making.

Lahle and I sit on the floor and place the seed, the book and the stone between us. I can feel the air trembling around us, as though the invocation is still at work in the room.

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“It’s like – ” I stumble, clear my throat and start over. “It’s like seeing yourself clearly, for the first time. But then you realise you only make sense in relation to everything else.”

Lahle picks up the seed and turns it over and over in her hands. It’s just an ordinary seed again. No light. No frequencies.

“I saw your father,” she says, her fingers tracing the edges of the seed. “And we made a tree. We made a tree out of light and dreams for his artwork, didn’t we?”

We’re looking at each other wide-eyed, and then the grins spread across our faces and we begin to chatter excitedly about the power of the invocation and the dreams we’ve seen, the way the energies had shifted once we’d begun to work on them.

“I wish everyone could see like this,” Lahle says. She’s turning the seed round and round in front of us.

“What if they could?” I blurt the words out without thinking. “What if we could share the Dreaming Invocation with them? As art.”

I feel my heart quicken, bearing me along on the adrenaline of a new idea, a new possibility. Lahle shuffles forward on hands and knees until we’re both bending over the book.

“But how?” she says. “There’s no invocation for showing people who aren’t elantar what we see.”

I shake my head. “We can make one,” I say. “You can make one.”

“Me?” Lahle looks up from the book, the doubt clear in her eyes. “What do I know of invocations?”

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“You know how to show people things,” I remind her. “You showed me your mother. You showed me those stories you used to make up at night, before bed. That memory. You showed me. You could show everyone this.”

“Parts of a whole,” says Lahle. “Everything and everyone connected.”

“Yes.”

She closes the book and I’m surprised to see her chewing her lip, her eyes glistening, her cheeks flushed. I’ve never seen her this close to tears.

“That’s what my mother used to say elantry was. What ruh itself was. Sharing energy. That’s why the Reaping Invocation is so destructive. It violates the principles of energy. She said those principles are life itself. Everything we do to each other, she said, we do to ourselves.”

“Yes,” I say. “Isn’t that what the Dreaming Invocation showed us? All the connections.”

Lahle stands and walks over to the clockface, looking down at the camp. I follow her, standing at her shoulder.

“The seed,” she says. “I could work with that. We could store all the dream- images in the seed and we could design an invocation so that when people touch it, it grows into the tree made of light. Maybe, I mean. We could try.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it’s a new form of art. The kind the Maradeki elantar were working with. Art as a form of energy. Maybe, if we showed people that art and elantry both have the same purpose, we could convince them…”

“What purpose?”

“Life.”

Lahle pauses. “Art is like ruh?” she says. “Art is an exchange of energies?”

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“I think so. I think that’s what these invocations are. They’re spells, but they’re also works of art.”

Lahle nods slowly. The moonlight ripples on her face, cerise shadows settling in her eyes, the creases of her lips.

“But what do we do with this artwork?” she says.

“We show Andras and Tibor and anyone else we can. We show the Prime.”

We can show Papa, I think. I know that this work connects with his, somehow. The Dreaming Invocation has shown me that much. But I can’t see how to bring the two together. I have to go step by step. The first thing to do is begin the work of collecting all the dream-images and find out how to store them in the seed.

“When do we start?” she asks.

“Tomorrow night,” I say. “And every night we can. We meet back here. We experiment. We work. And when it’s ready...”

What if they’re too afraid of it to see it? What if they can’t see it? What if they destroy everything we’ve made and send us home? I suspect Lahle is thinking the same things, but we don’t give voice to them yet. I can feel the power of the invocation still lingering in the room and the thrum of the frequencies all around us. It makes us feel brave. Tomorrow, we’ll think about the difficulties. For now, we only think about the possibilities. We can gain nothing if we don’t try. Papa is trying, with his artwork. If that’s what he’s doing, we can do the same.

“Do you think it’ll work best under a dreaming moon?” Lahle asks.

“Yes,” I say. “That should be our aim, to have it ready for the next full moon.”

“So we’ll meet here again tomorrow,” says Lahle.

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“Tomorrow,” I nod. “Tomorrow, we begin.”

Though I still don’t know how I’ll accomplish this work, I feel a sense of relief. I’ve been taught to hide my elantry, to disguise myself so I go unnoticed in Kalani streets. I’ve never imagined a world where I don’t have to be something other than myself. The invocation has shown me how to imagine that. Imagine it, but not achieve it. I still have to work. I have to create. My purpose is now aligned with Papa’s, then. We both strive to make what doesn’t yet exist.

“I should go back,” Lahle says. “We’ll come back. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

She gives me the seed and I tuck it, with the book, back into my pouch. I watch her moving down the hill, a slithering shadow sneaking through the blood-red city.

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USRA

Every morning after breakfast I line up for my knitting needles and wool and join the circle of women. When I’m knitting, my hands don’t itch. Damla sits beside me, her own hands in her lap, staring at the dirt. I try to encourage her to do a little work but if I give her needles and a ball of yarn she does nothing but hold them for hours. Her hair is so knotted my fingers can’t comb it out. Her skin seems grey and she speaks rarely. She doesn’t even ask Andras about the baby anymore – if she’s alive, if she’s well. She fears getting bad news.

I’ve finished the teddy bear I began knitting for the baby and, because there is nothing else to do, I start work on a fresh one. The other women see what I’m doing but no one asks me who they’re for.

My bears are perfect. All identical, with shiny buttons for eyes, their mouths stitched into a smile. I line them up next to me when I sleep at night. Two, then three, then five bears. I’m so quick with the needles that now the frenetic clacking irritates the other women. The guards have to prise the needles from my hands at the end of the day because I don’t want to leave the work.

I dream of Seda and the baby now. I dream of walking through the camp and hearing Seda’s birthing cries. I search for her in all the tents but there are only beds stained with blood, no mother or child. As I run, calling for her, her screams get louder and louder, until they seem to crash down on me from above and I curl up on the ground, my hands over my ears and my eyes squeezed shut. When I open them, Ada is there and she is holding the baby, it’s lifeless hands blue where they peek out through the folds of a blanket.

More bears, the next day. More and more. Their black eyes stare out at me, and I peer into them, seeking my own reflection, but I find nothing there.

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I dream of grey rain, the tolling of bells and the intonation of numbers. My number. Ada’s number. A never-ending list.

More bears. If their smiles are lopsided I unpick them and start again. Some of the mothers approach me, asking if they can give them to their children. There are no toys in the camp, they say. The children will love them. But I can’t give them away even though the children cry and the mothers are so exasperated that they shout at me and try to take them from me. Damla protects me. She pushes them down and makes them go away. I keep stitching my bears.

I dream of Pitr. He’s pacing a room. Pacing and pacing. I see his shadow through the window but when I approach and peer through, there’s nothing there. Pitr, I shout. Where are you? I notice something on the floor. It’s the seed. Ada’s seed. It’s glowing with light. Then the ground opens up and swallows the room and I fall too, sucked into the chasm.

Click-clack, go the needles. Sometimes my teeth chatter too. Click-clack. Click-clack.

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ADA

Lahle and I sit in the clocktower, looking down at the sleeping exiles. We’ve been working almost every night for the last three weeks, trying to find a way to imbue the seed with Lahle’s images, but we’re no further along than when we began. Lahle has all but given up. She paces, chewing her fingernails and tugging at her hair, while I keep trying to wrangle the frequencies emitted by each of the exiles into a manageable whole she can transfer to the seed. I keep going but we both know it’s not working.

I take a deep breath and try to clear my mind. I take the seed from Lahle. She stalks away and slumps back on the bed, covering her eyes with one arm. I try to ignore her. If she won’t help me, I’ll have to find my own way. I begin silently repeating the Dreaming Invocation. I know that’s the basis – my work begins there. But I still can’t figure out how to evolve it into something new. It’s also clear that the Dreaming Invocation isn’t as powerful without the full moon. The rhythms and frequencies that surge around me are dim, but still – the weak impressions are enough to work with. I begin to gather them together, shaping them into a sphere that I hope I can sublate into the seed’s flesh. But I can’t get a handle on them. They’re too diverse, too erratic, and, frustrated, I snatch at them until they spin away from me and I realise I’m standing back in the room, clutching the seed and trembling, the invocation broken.

I ready myself to try again, not sparing a glance at Lahle, who hasn’t moved from the bed. But the same thing happens, again and again, the dreamscapes slithering away, too numerous, too complex and unwieldy, for me to work with. I know I don’t have the right approach, but I can’t think of what else to try. I clench my hands together and press them against my forehead, trying to think. Nothing comes and I shiver, though I feel hot, my heart skipping.

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I know I need to come at the problem afresh. Papa says sometimes it takes him years to finish an artwork – that months may pass while forms coagulate in his mind before he even puts pencil to paper. He says he doesn’t hold on to ideas too tightly but lets them move and change as they will – that the art, in a sense, shapes itself in this meditative space. I settle on the floor, cross-legged, and try to calm my breathing and loosen my grip on the invocation, forgetting everything I think I know about it. My mind becomes a flat expanse, almost two-dimensional, in which thoughts are uninteresting and pass by. I let myself drift along the planes, and feel at peace.

When I open my eyes, I don’t try to catch onto an answer. Instead, I open the book and turn the pages, my fingers tracing the water marks.

Water.

It’s so obvious I almost laugh out loud. I realise I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I’ve been thinking of gathering people’s dreams in terms of contained entities. I’ve been trying to make whole something that is, by nature, diverse and amorphous. No, the dreams are more like flowing rivers, and the seed has to become a delta, not a dam.

“Lahle!” I say, surging to my feet. Lahle pulls herself to her feet, shuffling over. “Lahle, I have an idea. Help me, won’t you?”

We recite the invocation together, out loud this time. I ignore Lahle’s reluctant tone, forcing more of my own energy into the words to make up for it. The physical dimensions of the room disperse and we are back in the chromatic space of people’s dreams and thoughts, washing in and out, converging and diverging, and this time I don’t try to gather them all together. Instead, I begin to sing. A single note, low but clear, and I weave this through each of the dreams and anchor it in the seed. Lahle joins me, and the harmony strengthens the connections until I can see the glowing thread of it running through the camp below and ricocheting around the

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clocktower, passing through the patterns of Lahle and me, reaching down even into the caves below, and extending out through the forest. I picture it spreading across the sky like a great net and touching everyone, running in a thousand difference directions. Holding that image in my mind, I stop humming, and the song continues without me or Lahle. Our invocation has become self-sustaining, linking everyone’s dreamscapes to the seed. We step back into the present, into the tower, into our bodies.

“Ada,” Lahle gasps. “Look.”

The seed is glowing with Volta’s dreaming light. I know it’s ready. Trembling, I pass it to Lahle. She turns it over in her hands and the light revolves slowly, casting pink patterns on our faces. I feel as though we’re inside a star, or an atom. Our own tiny world.

We sit, holding the seed between us, for a long time, feeling the pulsations linking each breath to the ambient life of the seed and the dream worlds it contains.

“You know, I didn’t think it’d make a difference, when we first started,” says Lahle. “I was just kind of going along with you. It seemed so important to you. Did you really believe we could do it?”

“I’m not sure,” I reply. “I think I just wanted to believe in it.”

“But now?”

“Now, I think we have a chance. If we can show people that art and elantry are the same, that one informs the other, then perhaps – ”

“Perhaps.”

I still detect uncertainty in Lahle’s voice, but I don’t blame her. I’m not certain either. How can I be? But I’m relieved, in a way. I’ve done the work I know I’m meant to do. I close my eyes and try to release all the tension from my shoulders, my neck, my temples. I’m so tired. We’ve barely slept

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for weeks, developing the invocation, tracking the moon, sneaking around in the dark and working on what seemed like an impossible task.

“There are still a few hours until dawn,” I say. “You look exhausted. Get some sleep.”

Lahle settles on the bed. Outside, the night is cool and clear. I press my nose to the tarnished glass of the enormous clockface and pray for a blue dawn, a moonstone, like Mami says there is on Mellor, where there are canyons carved from rivers and craters bigger than cities.

Mami used to show me the skies through her telescope on nights like this, when the planets were in the right positions. We would stay up way past curfew and she would teach me about Mellor, pointing out its peaks and valleys and polar ice caps. She told me that Mellor guides the fate of war, that Mellor makes the crops grow, that Mellor bestows valour on the worthy. She said dawn is blue on Mellor, and showed me artist’s renderings in her old astronomy books – a ball of soft light peeking over the horizon, casting indigo shadows across a dark landscape not so different from our own deserts. It was only when I saw those pictures that I truly fell in love with the skies, with their alien beauty, and especially with the planets, full of geological mysteries and ancient histories that, if you went back far enough, intertwined with our own.

We stay later than we should. At first I think the orange glow is the first light of dawn and I hurry to wake Lahle so we’ll be able to sneak back into the camp in time for the bell, but then I see the ribbons of smoke.

“Lahle,” I say. She sits up, red-eyed, her hair tangled on one side, flattened on the other. “Is that fire?”

The flames are unmistakeable now, spreading swiftly among the timber buildings down near the shoreline and licking at the furthest row of tents. I

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can smell it – the way Dora had smelled it from here, in the clocktower, watching her town burn a hundred years ago.

“Lahle,” I say. “Everything is on fire.”

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PITR’S JOURNALS

Maradek

Where do these figures begin? On my worktable, they resemble large stones more than people – just the faintest suggestions of forms, the skin puckered like badly tacked silk where the protuberances that might be thought of as limbs erupt, oozing slurry. I imagine they are globs rising from the earth – the first multi-celled organisms to slither from the ocean’s pitch, back when the world was still dark. They remind me, albeit only a little, of Busra’s black figures, the melting wax statues she derived from religious icons that showed their transition between the states of spirit and matter. I think of my old teacher often these days, in this place that is so foreign that I do not trust my own eyes to show me what’s in front of me. Strange, isn’t it, that one who is dead is still teaching me how to see? She would say that all seeing is only perception, that the sense we think of as sight does not exist outside of thought. I did not appreciate fully what she meant until I came here.

Since I am not allowed to enter the city anymore, I have been spending all my time studying Maradeki art and developing my own piece for the Scriving.

Maradeki art, I know now, is preoccupied with landscape. Bucolic pastorals and scriptural paradises abound, as do depictions of historical events in particularly noteworthy locations – the Hill of Silence, the Channel of Serendipity, the Town of Dwell. Of Dwell, or Tartozkodik, there are many paintings, and it is these, I have heard, that are reproduced throughout the city now, mounted in public places, and the decrees of the Prime pasted next to them by Janos’s order with passages from the scripture about purity and honour.

It is not this art I am interested in. This, I know, is propaganda. However, I have been frustrated by many other examples of Maradeki

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art, nonetheless, and begin to perceive what Blanka sees as the stultification of art.

Just one example: I had heard of a series of prints by an artist named Aron Bajusz even in Kalan and I was eager to view the work, touted as exceptional for its use of texture. This cannot be denied. They are sombre renderings of rain on the sea and I was intrigued, at first, by how the water seems thick, almost gelatinous, in some places, and so fine it is almost sheer in others. The rain strikes the surface of the sea in concentric patterns, sometimes dimpling softly, at others times like darts so sharp I feel them as slices of my own flesh. And yet I was, ultimately, unmoved by the work, especially when I saw it was named Teremtes, which means Creation. I have read the relevant passage in Maradeki theology texts in the library and seen many other renderings of this very scene. It is the watering of the world – the period of forty days and forty nights during which the earth was drenched to create the seas, rivers and lakes. I feel this is an overdetermination, that the beauty and subtlety of the work is rendered void by this literalisation. Isn’t it enough to paint a beautiful scene without reducing it to mythography? Or am I merely misinterpreting the piece? Is there something I don’t understand about it? And yet – taking the Maradeki tradition and aesthetic as a whole – it seems that Bajusz is not the only one apparently lacking the vision or the drive to render the physical world with its own emotional texture, and not merely inscribe it with pre-existing axioms. This is where it wants for new perspectives, and this is what my own work must reveal, according to Blanka.

Blanka continues to support me and works, at the Council meetings, to free the Kalani from their camp and reinstate, at the very least, communications with Kalan so I can write to Usra and Ada. Despite her support, I feel isolated. The week after the Prime’s announcements, I noticed a distinct coldness from some of the students and artists of the

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karzat. I tried to convince myself it was only an initial reaction to the arrival of that Kalani skyship, and that once the issue faded from people’s minds I would again be treated with respect. Yet the issue did not fade – more ships have arrived, dilapidated hulks that spill forth their passengers like rotting garbage, and dirigibles transport them north, over the mountains, while people in the street speculate about why they are here and whether the dark magic they bring will threaten the city’s peace and civility.

I told myself that it would pass – this hostility, this simmering anger the Maradeki seem to have toward me. Then one afternoon I went to the garment district to visit a tailor, accompanied by Blanka and one of the city guards. I had persisted for several weeks in wearing some of my Kalani clothes even though they were decrepit in comparison to the fine fabrics and styling of Maradeki dress. I had felt a strong obligation to continue wearing the shirts Usra had stitched for me, but knew this was no longer a wise thing to do. We walked as quickly as I could, but whispers followed me as we passed through the streets into the garment district. I saw a mural on the side of one wall as we passed: a darkness descending upon still waters, the broken pieces of the city lying washed up on a barren shore. Everywhere, also, were notices of Halan’s trade sanctions and warnings not to approach any Kalani ships in the waters around Maradek but to report any foreign activity immediately to the city guard.

When we reached the store, there were no customers. The guard and Blanka waited outside while I rang the bell and waited for the tailor to appear. He had been recommended by Eszes, whose son often visited the store. After a moment, the tailor came through the curtain behind his desk with a large smile on his face that faded as soon as he caught sight of me, leaving a crease between his arched brows.

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“Good day,” he said, tonelessly. His eyes darted to the window, through which he could see Blanka and the guard, and then back to me. They raked me up and down thoroughly, steeping me in disdain.

“I need two new tunics,” I said, gesturing towards his display of samples. “Something, perhaps, like this.” I pointed to a mid-length tunic and matching set of trousers the colour of fawn with indigo embellishments at the hems.

“I am afraid I do not have any more of that fabric available,” said the tailor. He did not move from behind his desk, but set his hands wide on the varnished surface littered with measuring tape, fabric swatches and spooled thread.

“Oh,” I said. I wish, now, that I had left, but instead I gestured at the next display and asked if he had any of the grey or navy.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “We are waiting for a new shipment and unfortunately do not have many of these fabrics in the workshop. Perhaps you should come back later.”

“When will you…?”

Before I could finish, a young woman came through the curtain clutching a bolt of lovely mahogany linen – his daughter, I assumed, given the similarity.

“Well, how about this fabric?” I asked. “I’m sure this would do very well.”

The girl paused, looking from me to the tailor. She was about sixteen – older than Ada, but still, there was something in the depths of the eyes, a knowing, an intuition, that was familiar. She slipped me a small smile and offered the bolt to me.

“This is already being used for another set of suits,” said the tailor, snatching the cloth away from the girl before I could take it. The girl

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seemed about to say something, but at a look from the tailor, lowered her eyes and slipped back into the workshop behind the curtain.

“So there is nothing…?”

“I am afraid not.”

“Perhaps I could place an order.”

“I would require full payment up front.”

“Of course,” I said, and approached the desk, pulling out my purse. “How much?”

The figure he named was preposterous – an entire month’s salary.

“Sir,” I said, “is this some joke?”

He shrugged, removing his hands from the table and folding them in front of him.

“That is the price,” he said. “If you are unable to pay then I will bid you good day.”

He turned and was about to slip back into the workroom when I slammed my fist on the desk. A length of ribbon toppled off and unspooled on the floor. He glanced down at it, and then back to me, disdainfully. The guard was inside the shop within moments, asking the tailor if everything was all right. The tailor nodded.

“If you take issue with the service I offer,” he said, in a low and overly formal tone that made my face burn, my fingers twitch, “then you are most welcome to try the other tailors.”

He whisked the curtain behind him as he left the room, and through the swinging drapes I saw the well-stocked workroom, the fabrics standing

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in their racks, the shelves of glue and pins and buttons, the backs of two women working on a fine suit.

The guard accompanied Blanka and I back to the karzat without a word. The next day, Blanka asked the other male artists if they had any clothes for me, and now I sit in the studio and walk the hallways in borrowed garb that does not look or feel right on my body, and thus I am marked. Eyes track me wherever I go, so I feel as though I am never alone and yet distinctly alienated at the same time.

This morning I placed my little clay figures in the oven. I watched them cooking as I worked. One or two exploded and the shards lodged in the still-soft flesh of those on the outer edge of the shelf. When they were not quite hard – still a little malleable, slumping over their rotund middles with aprons of sludgy skin – I removed them and sat with them a while, piercing them with tiny skewers so there are sharp peaks and troughs in the flesh that resemble the geometric patterns of the sketches I have been working with.

I have begun to think of them less as figures and more as three- dimensional maps, though I do not yet know what they represent. Places? Thoughts? Matter? There is even something about them that reminds me of mathematical puzzles – the kind you give to children, which can be twisted and turned until they align in a series of numbers according to an equation that can only be derived from experimenting with the puzzle itself.

I arranged these forms in ways that seemed satisfactory, though minutes later I was compelled to start over as the configurations became disagreeable to the point of offence. I sat in the darkening studio and heard others in the passage outside going to the evening meal, and in the crepuscular haze I made some pencil sketches of the forms, connected to

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each other with a continuous line like a thought without beginning or end, until I could not go on because I had completely lost the light.

Image, I have realised, is important in Maradek. My appearance is unacceptable. My skin is too dark, my accent too rough. And yet I am unable to take control of my image – it is manipulated by Janos and Halan, and now by everyone in the street with a tongue or a paintbrush. I am discussed in the opinion sections of the newspapers under the moniker of ‘foreigner’ – ‘foreigners threaten our way of life,’ ‘foreigners will never assimilate into Maradek or be accepted by our ancestors,’ ‘greedy foreigners seek to profit from our hard work and wealth without contributing their share,’ and so on and on it goes.

I wonder if the Kalani imprisoned in their secret camp are reading such newspapers. I wonder what discussions they have, how much they know about their situation, and whether they possess the means to fight back. At least they have each other. I am alone, unable to write home, unable to think of my wife and daughter without the terrible weight of panic settling onto my chest so I find myself unable to breathe and have to close my eyes and remember when we were happiest, running the memories through my mind over and over again until I am no longer gulping like a dying fish. My first exhibition. Our marriage. The birth of Ada. I had held the newborn child in my arms and marvelled at the vulnerability of her flesh, the darkness of her eyes, the warmth of her breath. I had been overjoyed that life could persist under such conditions – the drought, the water feuds. Usra had felt guilty about bringing a child into such troubled times but I had convinced her not to void the pregnancy.

Surely our lives can’t end like this, sundered and unfinished. Surely.

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There are more murals in the streets, according to the other artists, and more letters appear in the papers every day, including ones from Janos that cite the scriptures in what Blanka deems a selective manner – passages concerning the sanctity of Maradeki art and traditions. I have wondered, of late, if people expect me to suddenly begin performing terrible invocations, to throw off the guise of the poor foreign artist and stride to the top of the halantek to begin destroying their world, reaping and reaping until there is nothing left, while on the horizon an armada of Kalani skyships appears to invade their city. Is my every word, my every gesture, considered a threat? Am I thought of as a spy? Or am I merely seen as a naughty child who would like to pilfer from the pantry? I have tried writing to the editors of the newspapers and seeking audiences with Janos and Halan, but I meet dead end after dead end. None will deal with me. Given such behaviour, I know there is no use trying to change minds by writing letters or engaging in conversation with those who talk behind my back and spread rumours. There is nothing more I can do in the face of the uncertainty, the fear and the superstition but work, and so I am in the studio from sunrise until long after sunset.

I make more figures and more sketches each day, and these I arrange in concentric patterns, first across the worktable, and then pinned to a series of easels, until there are no longer any work surfaces and I have to spread them across the floor and the walls and the windows so there is barely enough light to see by and Blanka jokes, when she sees it, of my fortress of impossible things.

I have continued to experiment with the small clay forms, wiring them together and then making various studies in pencil and charcoal. I have hundreds of them already, and arrange them in various patterns on my worktable, on my floor, and move among them as though through a two- dimensional landscape. Something emerges from them, though I cannot

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quite put it together yet. There is a quality to the forms, linked together by slender lines that rupture and reconvene in ambiguous ways.

I have begun to understand that line will dominate this work. The line itself is alive – this line is the nervous system that connects the whole and imbues it with sensation. Line prevents the work from disintegrating into a miasma of unintelligible forms. I find myself chasing this line like a musical hook, off one page and onto the next. It is in no way cerebral and therefore differs greatly from the way in which I have worked previously. I trust in this line, which knows more than I do, and I am eager to see what will emerge, for it is something not even I could anticipate.

Every day I rise early, eat alone, walk about the karzat a little, mainly in the sculpture garden, at hours when I know I will have it to myself. I am glad for my work – it is the only thing that distracts me when I pace at night, thinking of what might be happening to my family at home. How are they surviving without the money I send? Will they, heaven forbid, board one of those salvaged, unworthy vessels and attempt the journey here themselves? No, I assure myself, Usra would never do such a thing. She would adhere to our agreement, waiting for me at home. She would never commit to the journey – she does not like taking unknown risks, and there are too many unplottable points on that journey for her taste. No, they are safe at home, I tell myself over and over. I picture them at the kitchen table, at the market, on the roof of the apartment. I imagine the specific details to keep my dread at bay. The way Usra’s cheeks crinkle when she laughs. Ada’s slender hands on the block cutter, swift and sure. Their faces as they hunch over one of Usra’s astronomy books. The details ease the distance and the fear. They are safe, and waiting for me.

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Today I had a wonderful surprise. Eszes came to visit. I opened my studio door after the lunch hour to find her sitting among all the figures and sketches, studying them from first one angle and then another.

“Ah,” she said, turning to face me, stern, like a teacher. “There you are.”

“Eszes,” I said, picking my way through the sketches so I could embrace her. Her arms around me felt safe and warm – maternal. It had been so long since I had been close to someone. She smelled like soap and oils. She patted my shoulder gently as I withdrew and she stood, gesturing round the room.

“You’ve been working hard,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied. “I’ve been experimenting with these forms.”

I showed her some of my clay figures and the ways in which I had been fixing them together with wire in long and narrow towers, in dense knots, and in circular structures. She picked some of them up, turning them over in her hands before setting them down and moving deeper into the room to study the sketches.

“You’re struggling with depth,” she said, “with dimensionality.”

As soon as she said it, I realised that was the very element missing from the work. That in my drawing and re-drawing, my papering of the walls, the floors and even the ceiling, I had been attempting to submerge myself in the work, to sublimate myself within its multi-faceted corpus, but hadn’t found the means to do so yet.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that is exactly it.”

“Well, you know what you must do.”

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She looked at me expectantly, her hands folded neatly in front of her. I looked around, wondering what she had understood about my own work that I had not.

“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “You must make it three-dimensional. You must build it.”

I slowly turned a circle as I examined the drawings, which were like maps without any orientation. How could I create such a thing as a sculpture, or as an installation? My head reeled at the scale of it, the complexity, and yet I felt a thrill at the prospect of the work that lay ahead.

“Come,” she said, “is there somewhere we may walk a little?”

“Of course,” I said, trying to corral my new ideas into a convenient corner of my mind, to be accessed later. “Let’s go to the sculpture garden.”

At this hour, there were few others in the garden. Most were in their studios or at their classes. I have traipsed every sprawling inch of this garden, though perhaps it would more accurately be described as a small woodland or forest, dense with overgrown trees, bushes, shrubs and rockeries. There are vague paths that start abruptly or peter out, and a little stream that passes through a culvert in the wall and leads down to the sea. There are also the sculptures – mostly of people, though some of animals. They recline on cracked, ivy-twined benches, kneel among flower beds, gaze from the summit of flat-topped boulders. Marble, bronze, iron. They weather and become part of the landscape.

Eszes and I walked side-by-side, not following any path, while we talked.

“Your artwork,” she said, “is different to anything else in the Maradeki tradition.”

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I nodded. “That is my intent,” I said. “In my view, Maradeki art is limited by a mythographic language and system of references, so that it is condemned to replicate itself over and over. Blanka says that is why new perspectives are needed. She says the halantek’s system of interpretations has reified that which already exists so artists do not have the vision to perceive beyond that anymore.”

“You think your art superior to Maradeki art, then?” Eszes asked. I hesitated, but her gaze, at once severe and earnest, demanded an honest response.

“My art,” I explained, “is abstract, conceptual and theoretical. Experimental. I have moved beyond traditional forms out of necessity. In Kalan, the old ways are useless to us now. The old art is no longer relevant. The water feuds broke history in two and sundered us from the classics of our masters. They belong to another age. Blanka says a similar break is needed in Maradek. Is my art superior, then? I cannot say. It is different, and it will be judged by that difference.”

Blanka nodded slowly. “You are right,” she said. “Here in Maradek we are held in thrall of myth and landscape and allegory. We value art as a means of connection to our ancestors, and not in its own right. Art must be greater than what it represents. I think we must find new subjects, new methods, new questions. Perhaps we must study Kalani art to see where next we should go.”

We ruminated on the function of art as illusion. In some Maradeki art, Eszes explained, art was like a pair of glasses that corrects reality without transforming it. There was no will behind it, no vision.

“That is not sufficient anymore,” she said. “And therein lies the difference between art and illusion. Illusion is only a requalification of the now. Illusion reinstates the present, negating the very possibilities, the urgencies, that drive art forward.”

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We rose and began to walk back to the studio. It was a hot day. There had been no rain for weeks. When we stepped back into the studio, Eszes mopped her brow while she looked at the pieces again. I observed her from my worktable. She reminded me a little of Usra, in her honesty, her blunt speech and manner.

“Eszes,” I said. “Do you really think my art can make a difference? What if the interpretation fails? What if it goes badly?”

Eszes was still looking at the work when she replied.

“As an outsider,” she said, “your art speaks from nowhere. You do not fit into our frames of reference. You do not speak in our language. You are an emptiness against which we will measure ourselves and perceive our own lack. That will be enough, Pitr. Whether we are ready to make a leap beyond or not is not the question for an artist. For us, it is the proposition itself, the contestation of what is, and the suggestion of what may be.”

I see now what I must do. I will build larger objects. I will wire them together, doing away with any sense of space or time. There will be no patterns, no right way up, no start or finish. I will enfold within and around these structures mirrors and doors – apertures through which people can peek but will be unable to situate themselves satisfactorily within the quandary of figures and wires. It will be like coming unstuck in time, like trying to grasp at solid ground, but always falling down, around, up, forever. Will it be enough? It seems there is still something missing, but perhaps that is part of the function of the piece. To be incomplete.

I have always been curious about impossible objects – figures that are only possible in two dimensions and cannot render in three. The triangle, the stair, the cube – these are the most famous examples – and with these,

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the artist must create the illusion of dimension upon the flat surface of the page or the canvas. That is the effect I am striving for – the viewer must be entranced by the illusion of impossible geometries through tricks of the mirror, manipulations of sight lines. In doing so, I hope to show that appearances must be shattered, images driven beyond what they represent. Art pushes things to aesthetic ends, not material ones. Yet because of the dialectical space within which it occurs, it expands possibility. In art, impossible things become true. More than true, they are necessary.

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Part 3

Illuminations

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ADA

We run back to the camp. No one stops us as we vault the city wall and join the swell of people fleeing the fire that has consumed the shower block and the first two rows of tents. I realise the fence has caught alight too; and men with their heads and arms wrapped in cloths are rushing forward to push on the smoking beams. I have to find Mami and Damla. They could still be sleeping – trapped, drowning in smoke, burning. I try to push back against the tide of people but the bodies are too thick for me to weave through and I’m knocked back. I lose track of Lahle. Suddenly I’m reminded of Dora, running for her family, and I feel the book in its pouch thumping against my leg as I scramble up on to the edge of the aqueduct, searching for Mami and Damla. I catch sight of them at last, on the causeway, in the very middle of the crush of people straining forward, waiting to see if the fence will come down. I teeter down the crumbling wall and slip in among the bodies, shouldering my way through to Mami. She sees me coming and reaches out for me. There is black on her cheeks and her eyes are red.

“Where have you been?” she shouts.

“In the clocktower,” I answer. “What happened?”

“They started it!” says Mami. She is clutching Damla against her as others push past us. “Ediz and Emre. I woke up to the smell of smoke and Ediz was shouting, Get out, get out! He came up the hill, setting everything on fire. We didn’t have time to grab anything.”

We are swept along in the crush of bellies and shoulders, the criss-crossing of legs. All I can smell is smoke – smoke and sweat. Where are the guards? I look around for Tibor or Andras. There are no lights on in the guardhouse, no sign of them down at the harbour or near the infirmary.

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“Usra!” It’s Damla speaking. She’s looking back over her shoulder and I follow her gaze.

The guards, trapped inside the guardhouse, have broken down the door and smashed the windows and they’re swarming uphill after us. I hear the crackle and roar of shots overhead and I know they have weapons, that they’re shooting to warn us, but it only sends everyone into turmoil and we all surge forward. I can hardly breathe as I’m borne along in the flow until we reach the edge of the city, hundreds of people swarming over crushed and broken tents. There’s a shout from some of the men and then I see one of the fence posts come crashing down with a horrible screeching sound, the wire catching in the lower branches of the trees and snapping, and flames leaping into the forest and spreading faster than I thought possible through the scrub. The fire climbs, licking at the tree trunks, setting the foliage alight, and pieces of flaming litter rain down on us. The smoke spirals up and then comes billowing back at us on the wind, blanketing everyone. There’s a great cry from the crowd and I’m shouting along with everyone else as we push forward. I’m buffeted along, and Mami’s hand slips out of mine and I’m caught up, trying to turn back but I can’t. I can’t find the breath to shout out. Bodies press against me – hot, smoking bodies – and then I’m stumbling through the hole and cast into the black forest and I fall down, my hands sinking into smouldering leaves and dirt, crawling, trying to get away from the trampling feet. I slither on my belly further into the trees and curl against a tree trunk, protecting myself by wrapping my arms around myself. The long grass around me catches fire and I have to scramble away as it spreads, licking at the undergrowth. There are flames everywhere, above and below, and in between, a thick river of smoke and embers sting my eyes, my throat.

“Mami!” I scream. “Mami!”

Someone is pulling me up. It’s Lahle’s father, Ediz. Lahle and Emre are running ahead of me. Lahle looks back at me and waves both arms.

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“Come on!” she screams.

I’m on my feet again, stumbling after Ediz. But before we can get any further there’s another great crashing sound. Another section of fence is down and now more people are pouring into the forest, but the fire is spreading faster, outstripping our escape. I’m afraid of going with Lahle into the fire, frantic about leaving Mami and Damla behind. Lahle drags me along, and when I resist, her father grabs me tight and half drags me. I try to wrestle myself from his grip but I can’t get free.

“Wait!” I scream. “Mami! Damla!”

“We’ll find them later,” says Ediz. “Everyone’s leaving. We’re going to find the river and follow it to shelter. We’ve studied some maps. We know where to go.”

“I can’t leave without Mami!” I scream, and I kick my legs wildly, striking Ediz in the thigh. He stumbles and I scrabble away.

Within seconds I lose sight of them and the smoke is so thick I have to squeeze my eyes shut and feel my way. I stagger and trip and wind up on all fours, crawling forward and squinting at the figures clawing their way into the forest, their hands covering their mouths and noses. There – is that them? No, it’s a man and a woman, clutching something. A child, perhaps. I almost collide with a smouldering tree trunk and I flinch away from the heat. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. The smoke is pressing down on me; the fire is stealing all the air. I have to slither along on my belly, my fingers clutching at ash and dirt. I collide with someone’s legs, hear them shout, Where are you going, girl? Run! I can’t. I can’t. I need to find Mami. My throat is closed off and I can’t see anything anymore, just grey outlines in an orange and black haze. I have to get back to the fenceline. That’s where I last saw her.

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My leg catches in something sharp. The barbed wire. It wraps around my calf and I try to shake it off but it bites deeper and I try to scream but I have no air left. I scrabble at the ground, trying to find something that will prise the wire off, but there’s nothing. My fingers are black. The sky is black. The world is black.

I pass out of time and drift away on the ash, forgetting everything.

* * *

I wake. I’m lying in a bed. A camp bed, but this is not our tent. It has a ceiling, a window. The infirmary. I turn my head but I can’t get my eyes to focus. Dimly, I make out the shapes of others lying in rows, their chests rising and falling. Blinking eyes, wet and red. Skin, blackened and withered. It smells terrible. Not smoke anymore, but like something is decomposing. A slender figure comes through the door. I can’t make out her features. Is that Ils? I try to call out to her but there is something wrong with my throat and then I’m sinking, falling down and down, and my heart is fluttering and I wonder if I will die.

I dream terrible things. I watch Papa walk into the sea, further and further, until he sinks beneath the surface and disappears. There are no bubbles, no ripples, no signs of life. I stand, watching, unable to follow him. I see Mami sitting in our apartment in Kalan, and shades come for her, leaking in through the walls and swarming around her, engulfing her while she screams open-mouthed, reaching for me, the darkness pouring down her throat. My limbs are too heavy to go to her. I can’t move.

I wake again. Ils is by my side. She brings me water and I drink and drink. She is speaking but I can’t understand her. I sleep again.

The next time I wake, Andras is there. I mouth the words to him. What happened? He reaches out to take my hand and I cry out, flinching away. The skin is falling off my arms and I can’t bear to be touched. The pain

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rises up and threatens to suffocate me. Ils bustles over and reprimands him. Andras backs away, saying he’ll visit again. She gives me something to drink that sets the pain at a slight remove. I close my eyes but I don’t know if it’s sleep or just a state of deep exhaustion that I fall into.

Later, I try to ask Ils where Mami is. I can’t hear my own words, but she must understand me, because she shakes her head and says she doesn’t know. She is the one who tells me what happened.

She was in the infirmary when the fire broke out. A group of men, led by Lahle’s father, locked the guards in the guardhouse before the morning roll call and began evacuating the other exiles before they set the shower block alight. It spread faster than they’d anticipated, but they’d brought the fence down and most had run into the forest before the guards could escape and come after them. When the fire burned out, we were brought back, in ones or twos, our skin burned, our lungs scarred with smoke. I watch through slitted eyes as Ils tries to find the injured a sliver of space in which to lie down.

Many don’t come back. I don’t know if they survive. Two dozen or so are left unaccounted for, including Mami and Damla. No one has seen them. The guards repair the fence quickly and I’m worried that when Mami comes back she won’t be able to get in. I picture her and Damla, their fingers looped through the wire, shouting for me, and I try to rise so I can stand by the fenceline and keep a lookout for them, but Ils keeps pushing me back down and I’m so tired, my flesh so painful, that I acquiesce and can’t help but drift into sleep. My hand closes around the seed and the book, still in their pouch. Ils has placed it under my pillow, and I keep checking on them when no one else is looking. Somehow they’re unharmed.

Lahle’s father and uncle are locked in the cellar under the guardhouse; they are charged with instigating the fires and the breakout. Lahle tells me

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this, when she comes to see me. She is unharmed. I don’t look at her, don’t tell her about the book or the seed. She left me behind. I understand why she did, but still, I can’t forgive her yet. She let me go back into the fire, and she didn’t help me. She didn’t come after me. I turn my head away from her when she visits. I know it’s not fair to her. I know I’m looking for people to blame when those who are really to blame – Tibor and the guards and the Prime, even the energy lords back home, even the long- dead fanatikus – are the ones in control. But I can’t act against them and so I shun Lahle, and I sleep, and I wait. For Mami. For a judgement. I feel ready, somehow, lying on my back, unable to move, each breath like a flood of acid through my chest, my throat. There’s safety, in this pain. I can attend to it and nothing else.

Some time later Andras comes to see me again. I’ve lost track of the days, but I can speak now, softly, racked with coughing. He sits beside me, his hands in his lap, not meeting my gaze. I sense bad news like a shroud wrapped around him. I know I have not made the proper preparations, if such preparations could ever be made. I can’t turn back now.

“The Prime have made their decision,” he says. He can’t meet my eyes.

“When will they come?” I whisper.

“They will not come,” he says. “They made their pronouncement almost immediately after receiving news of the fire and the breakout. Their orders will be carried out in the coming weeks.”

“What orders?”

“For your deportation.”

“We’re to be sent back to Kalan.”

“Yes.”

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I slip away and slither through the dark dreams, endlessly, it seems. I search through them for Mami but I can’t seem to find her. I fall into a gap between this world and some other place until I no longer desire what is real. Ils tries to make me eat and drink, at least a little, but I refuse. I relish the dreams now, long for them to devour me whole. I want to give in to it, to be borne away on it. Madness. Yes, drink it down, soak and roll and revel in it. I tear at my own tender skin, try to climb the walls and smash the windows. A sane mind has no chance against the dreams. I hover in two – part of me, ensconced from the roiling torment of the rest of me, is still lucid and capable of observation. I know that if I allow myself to rise up I’ll have to face the judgement. I’ll have to live without Papa. Maybe without Mami. I’ll have to go on, alone. And I’m terrified of that.

I rage around the infirmary, and they want to lock me under the guardhouse but Andras convinces them not to, and he and Ils convey me to the kitchen. I hurl myself against the walls, pummel myself until I’m bruised and bleeding, and I don’t realise I’m screaming until I lose my voice. I’ve never been so exhausted, so maddened, so confused, so fearful. Eventually I fall back on the bed, exhausted, and Ils takes the opportunity to dart in and force some liquid down my throat that sends me to sleep. She places something in my hands and I clutch it – recognising the scales of the seed, the edges of the book, inside the soft leather of the pouch.

I expect nightmares, but there’s something else waiting for me instead. I dream of a blue sunrise and a tree so large it’s the whole world – no, the whole of being – and each of its branches is a mere iteration, each a self- contained universe. I walk the branches and the stars glisten in an ivory firmament. I reach out to pluck them like flowers, and blow on them, and Papa’s face emerges in the vibrations. I see him working on something. His artwork, growing day by day. I reach out to touch him and he turns, as though sensing my presence, and I ache to say something to him but my voice doesn’t work. I can only keep on gathering the stars and blowing on

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them, revealing him through these gestures, until there are no stars left and the sky is no longer white but black, and I tear it away to reveal the artwork Papa has been making. I recognise myself in it, and I weep. It’s made of the stars I’ve collected, and there’s a place for the seed, I can see. It pulses through my dreams, and I feel the effect of the Dreaming Invocation, healing me from the inside out.

I wake, and know I’ve chosen sanity, accepting what will come. What I have to do. Andras is there, as if called to my side. I’m weak, and he holds a cup of water for me to drink from. Most of it spills from my mouth and I fall back, letting him wipe my face clean. I fumble for the pouch, still hidden under the pillow. I haven’t lost track of it, even as I’ve slept, even as I’ve raged and fitted and fought. I’ve always returned to these items, I’ve always kept them safe. It’s what Dora tried to do. Have we both failed? What am I to do now with my ghostly inheritance? I don’t want them anymore. No. I don’t need them anymore. I realise now what must be done.

I give the seed to Andras and tell him he must give it to my father. I don’t know what will happen now, but I trust in the dream, in what the book and the seed have shown me. Andras promises he will do this, and then he leaves, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see him again.

I know what I have to do next. I have to find Mami. I use the invocation, slipping into the dreaming-state in which I can sense others’ energies like reverberating frequencies. There’s a difference to the rhythms in the camp now. The news of the Prime’s decision has spread. We’ve been pulled apart, left to piece ourselves back together, but we won’t be able to. There is not much left to salvage. In the slow dirge-like progressions of our frequencies, I realise we’re all thinking of death. Some even crave it. But what is worse is the terrible knowledge of the depths we are capable of. Yes, we. We people. We do this to each other, is what Lahle’s mother said. Isn’t that what elantry, what the invocations, have shown me? That being

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defies segregation, that in its totality we are inseparable. We do this to each other; I do this to myself.

Part of us will stay in the camp forever. Not just in the blood and tears that have soaked into the earth, the charred remains of the fence and the tents being hauled away as evidence of our brutality. But also in the memories that will remain here, singing unseen, of full moon nights soaking the town red, of a baby’s first cries, of new magic that breached a fortress of nightmares and tore them down, at least for a little while. Such fragile things will not survive the journey home, but they’ll be safe here. This place, at least, will remember me.

I sift through the echoes of past and present, moving farther and farther from Tartozkodik. I can find no trace of Mami. She is not here. Does that mean she is dead? I can’t accept that. The invocation slips away and I fall into a dark sleep, still calling her name.

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USRA

When the fire started I knew I couldn’t stay here anymore. The long days in the camp had blunted me, made me shapeless, so I do not fit anywhere. I’m a misfit, an offcut, a reject part. A misshapen teddy bear that needs to be unstitched and knitted back together. Where is the world I used to know? Where is the man I came for? Where is my child? I cannot hold on to myself, so as I run into the fire I let myself disperse.

I have always lived in darkness. I have always seen best at night. But not even I can see through this. I often thought of ending it – of finding my way down to the sea and being taken by the waves, or of stealing a knife and letting it slice apart the soft flesh of my throat. It would be quick and easy that way. And then the pain would end. There would be a gaping wound to prove it. Or the undisturbed water, treasuring its secrets.

No more questions. Where am I now? Nowhere. Who am I now? No one.

Somehow, I’d always known what was waiting for me here. Isn’t that why I’d fought Pitr so hard? Isn’t that why I’d been so resentful, so bitter, even though he’d made perfect sense? Yet I had walked the path, all the same. What for? Had I plunged into the abyss merely to see what was at the bottom? Was I mad? Did I enjoy this madness? Had I fallen into it slowly? Bit by bit? Or headlong, with open arms? I was afraid that I might have enjoyed it at first – it felt good, like revenge – but now I can’t go back. I cannot return to myself. Ever.

It began long before I boarded the skyship, though that was when it began to consume me. The terror. I’d clung to it, even though I had known it would destroy me. There had been a brief reprieve, when I thought there would be a child. Hope. But it hadn’t taken the terror away; it had only made it worse. I’d passed into realms beyond terror. Beyond madness. I could not say where that was. A kind of silent anguish that left no mark to bear witness, no raving voice, no weeping eyes. Just a constant, silent

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nothingness, the incessant march of it measured in the clicking of knitting needles, the sloughing of red skin from restless hands.

When I’d seen the fire, I had thought only of starting again, of burning everything behind me and stepping into a new place where I could be free of the madness and the terror. Did that mean leaving my daughter behind?

Part of me had been able to see what I was doing. It was a part of me that held onto Pitr and Ada. That held onto Pit’s letters and his smell and his hands on the brushes, illuminating the canvas, the world, for me. I’d watched myself plunging down and, knowing I would not come back, had not waited for myself. I have always had a huge capacity for love. Isn’t that why I came to Maradek? But I did not love myself enough to watch my end. So I’d run through the fire, into a new world.

The past threatens to overtake me. I find my way to water. It is deep and black and the moonlight is bright on the surface. The stars seem to be falling on top of me like rain. I wade in, deeper and deeper, until I can’t feel the bottom anymore.

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Part 4

Revelations

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PITR’S JOURNALS

Maradek

The work was finished and Blanka and I were preparing to transport it to the city square, where Sakim would perform the Scriving, when the man arrived. He wore the uniform of a city guard and I instantly flinched. Had someone learned of our plan? Had this man come to arrest me? Perhaps they would burn my artwork and put me on board a skyship and send me back across the sea, or transport me to the camp where the other Kalani were being held captive. Perhaps it would all end now. Unfinished.

It had only been hours ago that Blanka had run into my studio, her face red and her hair falling out of its tidy braids, standing up at the back as though she were petrified.

“We have to move now,” she had said. “Janos and Halan have agreed the Kalani are to be sent home. A majority agreement is all that is needed. Pitr. Your artwork must be ready tonight.”

I had worked furiously, constructing the final pieces and welding them together. We had loaded the pieces into carts to take through the city when the man entered the room without knocking and looked from me to Blanka. I saw at once he had not slept. His eyes seemed bruised, his skin loose and slick with sweat.

“Pitr Isalla?” he said. He was panting – he had been running.

Blanka stepped forward before I could respond.

“Who’s asking?” she said.

“My name is Andras,” he replied. “I am a guard at the Kalani camp at Tartozkodik.”

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He strode over to me. He clutched something in his hand, which he held out to me. I saw at once what it was: Ada’s seed.

“How...?” I reached out for it, picked it up in one hand. It was heavier than I remembered, and it hummed as I held it, radiating a puce-coloured light.

Andras explained, yet I only half-listened. I was numb with disbelief. How long had Ada been there? Was Usra with her? Had Janos kept this information from me? I wanted to run out the door. Run all the way to Tartozkodik. But the seed held me there. I felt something tug within my chest, as though one of the wires from my sculpture had implanted itself in my chest and strung me and my daughter together, shrinking the miles between us until I sensed her as a shadow beside me whose every movement jerked my centre to and fro.

“She says it is for you,” he said. “She says it is an artwork.”

Blanka looked from me to the seed. I did not know what to say. My mind had emptied, my body was numb.

“Come,” Blanka said. “We will bury it beneath the sculpture.”

Andras helped us, carrying some of the smaller pieces we could not fit into the carts. It was almost midnight. We had chosen this hour because there would be few people in the streets to stop us.

I felt the potency of the seed vibrating against my heart as we began to pull the carts through the halls of the karzat. I tucked it close, beneath my tunic. When we stepped out beneath the moonlight, its vibrations multiplied until I felt as though it sang from within my own chest. I realised, then, that the artwork would have been incomplete without the seed. I could not have resolved the unresolvable without Ada. I knew she had found a way to journey into the beyond and I desired to follow her there, to see what lay ahead.

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It is no ordinary seed, and she is no ordinary daughter. She learned to love from her mother, of that I’m sure. She learned to survive. But perhaps this ability to create, to see, to believe – yes, I like to think that these gifts she received from me.

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It appeared that night. The tree sprouted out of the sculpture in the city square. All were drawn to it, stumbling in their fatigue, a horde of footsore sleepwalkers called to this common dream come to life.

They gathered round in circles to watch it grow. This artwork, this impossible thing.

They put their eyes to the openings, they saw the refracted images of things transformed from one plane to another and they came unstuck and drifted from their bodies through the fantastic schemata of an imaginary elsewhere. For some, the forms were their star-mothers with the cosmic dust spilling out into distant galaxies, the frost gilding the dormant peaks of the newborn planets. For some, it was a poem, the sounds transformed into shapes that were a thousand different sonnets connected by angles and planes. For others, it was a dance, the disjointed movements spot-lit in freeze-framed glossolalia of the body.

At midnight, the tree began to grow, and everyone stood back. It was made of light, efflorescent, and it soared upward and spread branches that were trimmed with silver-green shoots, and then it began to fruit. The seeds and blossoms drifted down like motes of dust, weightless and free, and found their way into the hands of the gathered dreamers.

They were sucked into the invocation, and saw as she saw, felt the reverberations of the past and the present rolling back and forth. They became legion, warded by light, and slid away from themselves to discover the strident reverberations of those dwelling in the north. They mingled with their own rhythms and built to a fever pitch, and together they

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discovered the pulsations that dispersed them back into the artwork. They spanned a great web together, twisting reality first one way and then another, inventing more and more improbable configurations until they came adrift, surrendering themselves entire.

The sun was coming up. The final cone spun out of the earth and flew in a spiral, gilded by sun, into the hands of the artist. It illuminated him, and his effervescence touched everyone, until they became vortexes of light, and stepped into free-fall.

They dreamed together, under Volta’s red moon. They dreamed what had not been dreamt before.

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ADA

When the guards come to the infirmary to tell me my father will arrive on the next dirigible, I’m not there. Lahle is the one who finds me at the fenceline, where I’m watching the forest for any sign of Mami. She tells me Papa is coming. But I don’t move. I stand vigil from morning to night, not even breaking for the midday meal. Sometimes Lahle joins me. We’re still not speaking to each other, but I know I’ll forgive her soon.

I watch for Mami even when the dirigibles appear over the mountains and land down near the sea. Even as I hear the guards moving through the camp, calling my name, I don’t tear myself away from the last place I saw her. I ache to catch a glimpse of her wild hair or hear her voice on the wind. I want to turn around and find her holding out her arms for me, ready to gather me into her with that look in her eyes – as though she contains so much love she can hardly bear it.

Soon I’ll have to leave. But part of me will live on here, and part of me will be no more. Erased in this place between the clocktower and the sea. I will have to dream myself back into existence. I don’t know if it’s possible. But I have to try. I owe it to myself, and to everything that perished here. To everything that might yet be.

Goodbye, Mami.

Papa is waiting for us. Waiting for me.

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Glossary

Edda: Kalani festival of light celebrating the goddess Nura.

Elantry: magic that draws on ruh and manifests in many different ways. Elantry can be used in healing, manipulating weather, and the arts, for example. Also: elantir (a single practitioner of elantry) and elantar (plural of elantir).

Fanatikus: secret police in Maradek.

Halantek: prayer hall and exhibition space in Maradek where the Scriving for Eszes’ new exhibition takes place.

The Hand: militant arm of the Thierran energy alliance.

Iade: ceremony to return light to Nura on Edda, the festival of light.

Kalan: the city Ada, Pitr and Usra come from, controlled by the Thierran energy alliance and their militia, known as the Hand.

Karzat: Maradek’s renowned conservatorium of visual arts.

Maradek: a city known for its artistic output. The arts guide not only cultural but also political and religious life in the city.

Nura: Kalani goddess of light.

Piszok: Derogatory term for magical practitioners in Maradek.

Prime: council consisting of the three heads of state in Maradek – artistic, religious and bureaucratic.

Ruh: the energy of living things, also known also as lifeblood. In the Reaping Invocation, ruh is transferred into power for the Thierran energy grid.

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Scriving: the interpretation ceremony for new works of art conducted by the interpreters of the halantek.

Thierrans: The Kalani energy lords, who control Kalan.

Volta: Goddess of the moon, associated with dreams.

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