Flux (2 page)
“My child,” a voice whispered and it was her mother’s voice, Nellie’s own mother named Lydia, the mother who’d disappeared sixteen aching months ago, her voice deep with the echoes of what could not be understood. Then the hand withdrew, retreating into the long darkness. Lunging after it, Nellie knocked over the crate. The candle toppled, hissing out, and the gate to the mother-world disappeared, leaving a twelve-year-old girl collapsed in a gold-brocaded remembering dress beneath the sighs of a floating gauze curtain.
Chapter 2
N
ELLIE WOKED LATE
, to a dull pain that throbbed at the base of her brain. Shifting and muttering in her nest of dirty blankets, she hovered between sleeping and waking, letting her eyelids drift repeatedly open, then closed. Sometimes the morning sludge in her head was a gutter thick with mud, and there was no one to help pull her out of her dreams— no nagging mother knocking at a bedroom door, no bus driver waiting at a corner stop, no schoolteacher summoning up a 9:00 a.m. smile as her students walked into the room. The grimmest and most basic fact of Nellie’s life was the first to attack her every morning—if she decided to lie without moving until breath left her and her body rotted into the shack’s crumbling floor, no one would notice. Each day she came awake daydreaming about the pleasures of dying, of slipping gradually backward into the comforting world of the dead where she wouldn’t have to try anymore, could simply accept the way things had gone and let everything rest as it was. No more endlessly trying to make things come together again, trying to make sense of what could not be understood. And no more endlessly hungry belly, with the deeper emptiness that threatened beyond it.
Outside the shack, a flock of squawking wickawoos descended into the foliage and prepared to do battle over a patch of dengle-berries. Grunting irritably, Nellie rolled over and focused on the window. The sagging rectangle of light was a dim haze of purples and greens that swelled gently on the incoming breeze. With a start she realized she’d forgotten to take down the gauze curtain after last night’s remembering session and came fully awake, riding the thundering of her heart. This was blasphemy, a major trespass against the Goddess who treasured any ritual object used to invoke Her presence. Ivana’s tokens were sacred, set aside for divine purposes, and couldn’t be left lying about. What if She’d noticed the holy veil floating carelessly in the morning light while Her twelve-year-old devotee slept? What if She took offence and decided to never again bless the shack with Her presence?
Quickly Nellie sat up, intending to return the gauze curtain to its customary hiding place under the stack of tea towels with the gold-brocaded dress. But as she pushed herself upright, the shack spun into a dizzy ooze, forcing her to drop back onto her pad of blankets. For a long moment her mind rippled and whirled, and then it opened onto a great humming darkness full of stars that shifted in and out of mysterious complex alignments. The stars glowed in a wealth of unfamiliar colors, and they seemed to be calling to one another in shrill piercing voices. The sound was unearthly, surrounding and resonating through Nellie’s body until she felt as if the physical world was about to dissolve into one vast singing wave.
Gradually the vision faded from her head and she opened her eyes with a cautious whimper. This wasn’t the first time she’d woken, still carrying intense dreams of stars in flux, nor was it the first time she’d felt those dreams shuffle her physical reality like a deck of cards. Sometimes the stars seemed to transport her to unfamiliar places, and she would open her eyes to find herself in a room with arcing white walls, a tropical garden, or a mechanical cubicle with sleepy blinking lights. At such times she would hold on desperately
with her mind, trying to imprint what she saw into memory, but the images remained only for a heartbeat, then faded. Still, Nellie couldn’t convince herself they were mere fantasy. The places seemed more real, more
solid
than the dilapidated shack she called home— as if they held more of her, were keeping the most important part of herself just beyond reach.
Was that what a soul was?
she wondered.
A part of you that lived somewhere else?
Lifting a hand to the dim window light, she was relieved to see it was human. Her dreams cast her in such weird forms—batlike, reptilian, or furred like a bear—and sometimes she seemed to be made of light, changing shape as easily as thought.
Muttering fervent apologies to the Goddess, Nellie took down the gauze curtain and slid it under the stack of filthy tea towels. Then she stood waiting, one hand braced against the windowsill, but the shack’s walls remained firmly in place and no further craziness swung through her head. As with most of her morning swoons this one was short-lived, but she knew what it foretold. Nights of odd dreaming were inevitably followed by days of flux. When the stars danced in her dreams, the morning air vibrated strangely, people’s brain waves changed, and it was a time of subtleties with new words suddenly appearing in the language, unfamiliar viruses surfacing and a universal slipperiness to the eye.
When she’d lived in the Interior, there had been no singing stars and no days of flux. There, nothing had been erratic and every aspect of a child’s life had been organized to the minutest detail. Family, school, religion and hobbies—it had all been as orderly as the night sky. In fact the slow overhead shift of the stars had dictated everything from the seasons, with their predictable weather patterns, festivals, and holidays, to each individual’s school, playmates, career, and breeding partners. Nellie clearly remembered charting the major constellations in class and studying the nine signs of the zodiac and their caste rules. Her star sign had been the Cat constellation, which represented one of the lowest castes, but it hadn’t meant much to her. Back then the stars had seemed
irrelevant, nothing more than meaningless pinpoints of cold brilliant light, just as the blue constellation tattooed to the inside of her left wrist had held no significance, being simply the identity tattoo she’d extended like everyone else to be scanned at the security entrances to her school and apartment building, nearby stores, rec center, and library branch. All across the Interior, electronic billboards constantly flashed the message: YOUR GOVERNMENT CARES ABOUT EVERY CITIZEN. YOUR GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE AT ALL TIMES.
The Interior had held no days of flux, but Nellie remembered the constant feeling of secrets, as if another layer of meaning lay hidden behind everything she saw. As if, she thought, shivering in the shack’s early morning coolness, those secrets had somehow crept inside her and were growing there, like an innermost eighth skin.
Creepy, creepy. Ooly-goolies
. Muttering further incantations to the Goddess, she pulled off the man’s dress shirt she used for sleeping and dipped a grimy tea towel into the bucket of rainwater she stored in a corner. Then she gave herself a perfunctory sponge bath. A thorough morning wash had been something her mother had always insisted upon. While Nellie’s efforts could hardly be called thorough, she continued to obediently trickle handfuls of water over various parts of her body and rub herself dry every morning. Sometimes she used soap, but usually reserved it for her infrequent dips in a nearby brook. This morning she splashed water liberally here and there, then stopped to press her hands firmly against the small curve of her breasts. Eyes narrowed to slits, she considered. Had they grown since yesterday? She pressed harder, ignoring the pain. Maybe, maybe not, but one thing was certain—she was going to have to come up with a new solution for keeping them flat. Sleeping on her stomach wasn’t working, and neither was the thought-management program she’d invented after reading a newspaper article. The article had been about stress, and the small jiggling blobs on Nellie’s chest were certainly stressful, but the managing thoughts she’d directed at them hadn’t had any noticeable effect to date.
Nor had the bra she’d filched from a department store. The damn thing had stuck out of her chest like the front ends of two canoes. Well, one canoe—the bra had been so large, one of the cups had dangled ineffectually at her waist. Nellie hadn’t known anything about sizes, she’d just grabbed the closest package off the shelf. How was she supposed to know if she was a 48D or a 32A?
Muttering under her breath, she released her breasts and began to explore the hair at her crotch with curious fingers. When it had first appeared she’d tried to pull it out, thinking flux was finally taking over her body and she was about to be permanently transformed into a bear or a large hairy dog. Then she’d come across a discarded magazine full of naked women, and discovered every one of them sported a bearskin between her legs. The magazine gave no reason for the bearskin, nor did it explain why Nellie also had fur in her armpits and the magazine women didn’t, but she’d relaxed a little, realizing she wasn’t about to grow claws and fangs and start foraging for bugs in rotten logs.
She’d found other magazines since, in garbage pails and back alleys, and kept them as a reference for the changes her body was experiencing. Though she’d never seen her mother naked, Nellie could remember the electric razor she’d used to shave her legs. There were no electrical outlets in the shack, and the fine blond hairs on her own legs continued to grow. The mother she remembered had belonged to a small girl with smooth hairless skin. Day by day Nellie felt herself losing her mother more completely, through each small change in her growing body.
The one thing she continued to share with the mother she remembered was a small scar on the inside of her left wrist. Tearing open a package of oolaga candy, Nellie munched steadily as she studied the shiny pink mark on her skin. In the Interior her mother had never commented on their identity tattoos except to say “Stick out your wrist for the scanner, honey,” but the first thing she’d attended to upon their arrival in the Outbacks had been the removal of the Cat constellation tattoos. Both Nellie and her
mother had been born under the sign of the Cat, and their tattoos had depicted a small crouched cat outlined in tiny blue stars. Nellie had been fond of hers, nicknaming it Starpurr, but no indigenous Outbacker sported a tattoo, and they were regarded with suspicion. Nellie’s memory of the operation that had removed her tattoo was vague, consisting of little more than a dimly lit kitchen at the back of a sparsely furnished house. She remembered perching on a creaky chair and sipping a sweet drink as a whispered conversation passed between her mother and an unfamiliar man. Money had rustled, changing hands, and then a sleepy darkness had enveloped her. Several hours later she’d woken to find her bandaged wrist throbbing painfully and her mother, wearing a similar bandage, smiling tearfully from across the room.
“We’re free, Nellie,” she’d whispered. “Now no one can tell who we are, and out here no one cares.”
When she’d removed the bandage several days later, the tattoo had been gone along with the small bump that had always sat beneath the skin on her wrist, slightly distorting the cat’s head. Though Nellie had pestered her mother, she’d never received an explanation for the removal of their tattoos or their escape from the Interior, but she knew they were somehow connected to flux and the dreams that drove Outbackers wild, tussling with their minds like a storm wind among trees. Signs of it lived in their faces, their startling tempers and wary manner, clues that revealed the way other realities kept tugging at the boundaries of this one, taunting and pulling tricks. True Outbackers walked as if the ground beneath their feet was always about to be transformed into the raging Funnerbye Sea, and they trusted nothing—not the things they were told, not the rumors they overheard, and certainly not the confidences they passed on to others. All in all, Nellie figured, she’d choose an Outbacker for a friend over someone from the Interior any day. The people you wanted to steer clear of were the ones who
expected
you to trust them and toss your own brain into the nearest garbage heap.
Having tallied up the new bug bites she’d gotten overnight, she tugged on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and spread the tea towel to dry. Then she tidied her nest of blankets, skewered her blond hair into a short ponytail and slid a small blue knapsack onto her back. Slipping out of the shack, she swung up the nearest doogden tree and crawled a well-known network of branches to the edge of the trees, where she dropped into ground-level foliage. Depending on the route she took through the tangled copse, she could emerge near a deserted quarry, a highway that traveled south toward the Interior, or the scrub that stretched toward Dorniver’s outskirts. Much of the area was used for bootlegging, dirt biking and romance, but in the year she’d spent living in the shack no one had ventured into the wooded area that enclosed it. Still, she remained cautious when coming into the open, remembering the way her mother had hesitated in doorways those last few days, so tense her nostrils had flared.
Today Nellie crouched as always, scanning the surrounding scrub and sniffing. The smell of exhaust coiled thick in the air— some kind of vehicle must have recently passed—but the only sound was the rustling sunburnt grass and a scattering of siccna crickets. Crawling through the long grass, she tracked the scent of the exhaust to a set of tire marks that led to a burgundy van parked near the old quarry. Through the weaving grass, she could see several men smoking cigarettes as they set up delicate complex instruments that resembled mechanical birds, their long necks straining toward the sky. The men worked meticulously, checking and rechecking everything they did against instructions displayed on a small computer.
With a soft grunt, Nellie pressed closer to the ground. The burgundy van was sleek, a newer model that would be inconspicuous in the Interior but spoke volumes in the Outbacks. The Interior frequently dispensed officials beyond its borders to scrutinize the surrounding area, take notes and report back. When sleek unidentified vehicles were spotted cruising Dorniver, everyone laid low. Usually these officials were after someone specific, but they had the
authority to apprehend anyone on a whim, and no one who disappeared into the Interior’s bureaucracy was ever heard from again.
