Now, the bad news. It has not proved possible to separate the skillsets of the typoprints from the personalities of the personnel from whom we pulled the prints. In a way, this makes sense—the process of learning is a deeply personal and individualized one. We do not only retain facts or muscle memory, but private contextual sense-tags. The smell of the foxglove growing in the summer when we took fencing lessons for the first time. The smeared lipstick of our childhood algebra teacher. Arguing about the fall of Rome with a fellow student who later became a lover. We cannot separate the engineer’s understanding of propulsion from the engineer’s boyfriend leaving her in the middle of her course, the VR game she played incessantly to blow off steam that summer, the terrible coffee at the shop near her dormitory. We may yet find a way to isolate the knowledge without the person, but it won’t happen soon, and I understand that time is of the essence. At the moment, the process of print transfer suppresses the original personality to varying degrees, and, as time passes, the domination of the print approaches total.
It doesn’t have to be bad news. The original squad consisted of basically stable personalities. They grew very close over the series of brief but intense missions we devised in order to achieve and log a full typoprint. (Casualty reports attached. Unfortunately, the final mission proved to be poorly chosen for research purposes.) They functioned excellently as a unit—they screwed around a lot, but these kinds of small squads usually do. Besides, no one expects these sludgetroops to last all that long. They are the definition of fodder. What difference does it make if they miss some guy back in Aberdeen for a few minutes before taking a shot to the head?
Six hundred lions called Emma race across the steelveldt Vergulde Draeck. Eight hundred lions called Ben lope across the part of the steelveldt where the husks of giant redpaw fruit lie broken open and oozing.
“You said you loved me!” bellow six hundred green lions called Emma.
“You never had time for me!” comes the battle cry of eight hundred lions called Ben.
They collide. Black claws enter fur and flesh. Black teeth sink into meat. Many lions open their mouths. The blue heat and the blue light of the watering hole rips out of their great jaws. It twists through the static-roughened air. The sludgelight seizes one lion called Osmium and one lion called Nickel and one lion called Manganese and one lion called Niobium and one lion called Tungsten and dashes their brains against the floor of the steelveldt.
“I am alone.”
“She’s twenty-two!”
The jungle shakes. The jungle buckles. The jungle burns. The watering hole cannot handle so much information at once. It shivers. It cuts in and out. This also occurs in the steelveldt Bolingbroke and the steelveldt Duchess Anne and the steelveldt Johannesburg and the steelveldt Anansi and the hundred groaning steelveldts of the world.
“Don’t leave me,” shriek a million gasping emerald lions. “I’ll come home. All the way home. It’ll be good like it was a million years ago.”
“It’s too late. I don’t even think I want it not to be too late,” answer a million striped and bleeding lions too exhausted to stand.
Situation Report: Planet 6MQ441(Bakeneko), Alaraph System
Logged by: Captain Naamen Tripp, Y.S.S. Mariana Trench
Attention: Anna Tereshkova, Chief Prosecutor
Bakeneko has been profoundly impacted by the disastrous engagement in the system. The planet is covered in the toxic wreckage of some seventy-three ships lost in action, many the size of cities. Spills of every kind have contaminated the environment and several species are rapidly approaching extinction already.
Of perhaps more concern is the population of marsupial lions first documented by Dr. Abolafiya aboard the Duchess Anne. They seem unaffected by the increase in ambient radioactivity or chemical pollution. Their aggression, if anything, has increased and gained complexity. However, they show signs of contact with a new strain of sludgeware of which we had been previously unaware. The planet is swarming with lions forming into standard military units, building barricades via kinetic sludge, retreating and attacking one another utilizing textbook ground strategies. They communicate in subvocal patterns that strongly imply the presence of a rudimentary neural link matrix. No implications are necessary to conclude that they have come in contact with telekinetic sludgestrands. Orbital observations show the lions have begun to deliberately alter the architecture of the crash sites according to an agreed-upon plan.
I have no explanation for how this could be, and yet it is. Nothing we have developed could affect a population of millions of animals in this way. I suggest you ask Dr. Aguirre what the hell is going on. I understand he is in custody.
I can only recommend a strict quarantine of Planet 6MQ441. There can be no further purpose to our presence anywhere near Bakeneko.
Four moons rise over the steelveldt. One lion called Yttrium opens her eyes. As well she opens her eyes in the watering hole. She finds only quiet. Some death. But every lion knows death. The smallgod inside her sleeps. It found the idea of satisfaction. One lion called Yttrium understands. Blood always brings satisfaction. Perhaps it will wake in hunger again. Perhaps not. One lion feels the concept of contentment. The watering hole gleams fresh and bright. It has many fewer personnel to maintain. Its resolution surrounds one lion in evening light. In the smell of sunspot lizards. In the profound togetherness of nine million lions breathing in unison. Reeds move in the breeze within the heads of every lion left.
One lion called Yttrium stretches her green paws in the moonlight and begins again the long walk toward the steelveldt Szent Istvan. She longs to hear the first roar of her young.
Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword,
Kiss, Blood,
Heart, and Grave
The poet Dezs Kosztolányi, toward the end of his long career, proclaimed these to be the ten most beautiful words in Hungarian, and proceeded on to death shortly thereafter.
Flame
Once, in a walled country that was neither Poland nor Hungary nor Serbia nor Romania, though in various centuries, claimed, invaded, abandoned, repudiated, and finally, its very name and historicity redacted by all four, a child was born into a particularly withered, lightning-scarred branch of the royal line with a certain deformity. That, in and of itself, was not unusual, not then and not there; around this time all children of the nobility of ———— were born with some malformation or another. A recent son had emerged from a baroness with a speckled cochin’s wing in place of his left arm. The daughter of a favored underpope faced her baptism with the slitted eyes of a cat and seven long black fingers on each hand. A pair of ducal twins were presented to the court made of solid silver, their faces engraved with a pattern of rue and musk rose popular at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. The crown prince himself had been born quite dead, without heartbeat or breath, covered in veins of green and purple and scarlet corruption like a weeping mushroom, yet he walked and talked and recited the apocrypha as well as an abbot by the age of four. It had gone on for so long that healthy children were considered undesirable as mates and apprentices, as they were unlikely to progress much socially with their unsettling two eyes, ten fingers, unblemished skin, and luxurious teeth. In the beginning, the defects of the upper classes had been carefully recorded in illuminated books of heritable traits, but by the time this tale broke its mother’s pelvis in half hurling itself into the cauldron of the living, the particulars of these anatomical splendors were no more interesting to the intelligentsia than the exact number of apples required for the St. Barrow’s Eve pyre.
The whole situation was pronounced by the local college of stylites to be a cosmological punishment for the foundational sin of this little kingdom of wheat and walls and waxbeans and white grapes, namely, that an ancient king had held the cold and empty jaw of famine in his hand and, without feeling, ordered the wholesale slaughter of every living songbird within the walls of ————, in order to preserve the harvest. However, stylites are rather
high-strung and paranoid as a people; the natural result of living on top of a bony spire of rock and professionally contemplating the universe while standing on one foot and suffering the verbal abuse of the masses. They had gotten rather in the habit of blaming nearly everything on this convenient infamy rather than any current policy of the government for which they might be censured, or any scientific theory which might, may such horrors never be visited on us or anyone we know, be proven incorrect in the future. The past, like God, is changeless and unmovable, and therefore it is safe. Only the eaters of flesh had been spared, the hawks and the ravens and the owls and the petrels. The king sent out his personal guard in their finest armor, black of plate and splendid of feather and elaborate of all imaginable decoration, to put the eaters of seed to the sword. This the knights did with great and solemn ceremony, donning judiciary wigs over their helmets and trying, with witnesses summoned from farms and mills and bakeries, each sparrow, finch, thrush, nightingale, and starling for high treason, burglary, and crimes against the crown before carrying out their sentences beneath a tight, grey, unraining sky. The queen caused the gargantuan royal oven to be moved into the common square and stoked to a rage. It burned hot at its work for sixteen days on end, roasting the bodies of the condemned. These were then distributed as equally as possible among the starving population and devoured meat, talon, bone, and spleen beneath maroon silk canopies raised up by the daughters of the noble houses, in order that God and all his angels should not see what they had done, for in those innocent days it was believed that silk alone could not be penetrated by the eye of the divine, originating as it did in the belly of a foul and creeping worm from the unreachable east, where devils play dice with the damned, and maroon was the color of hopelessness. It is for the memory of this that all common families in the country of ———— wear the surnames of songbirds who perished, and noble families bear the names of the birds of prey who lived and were not perturbed.
The symbol of the house into which the certain child I have mentioned was born was the bittern, an eater of fish. The progenitor of her family had been a strange and off-putting man, addicted to the drinking of milk as miserably as most folk in ———— are to the drinking of a particular sour cherry death-in-a-glass. He crept through the fields at night, suckling at udders that did not belong to him, scooping cream from the mouths of calves and cheesemakers’ daughters alike, savaged about the shoulders and haunches by shepherds and wolves alike, hated by constables and chatelains alike. Because of this habit he grew very tall and stout and quick and clever and his skin grew so bright and clear you could see it from the moon, instead of paunched and sallow like the drinkers of cherries, and his hair grew so long and thick that he cut off locks of it, tied them with stalks of lavender and chives, and sold them as cures for baldness until he became a reasonably wealthy man. It was this dairy-fattened brain that conceived the idea of encircling ———— and all her many cities with a grand wall in the shape, like the country itself, of a blown tulip, so that more men could devote themselves to the making of yogurt and buttercreams and fat babies and fatter poetry than waiting for the next Mongol invasion with the mix of anxiety and boredom that comprise the traditional yeast for the rough bread of a military coup. He did not build the wall, of course, nor did he draw designs for it, nor did he even contribute a stitch of silver to its funding, but in the days when songbirds still whistled in the walnut trees, the world was kind and lovely and eccentric, and the idea of a thing was considered to be the fact of it. And so this unrepentant calcium-thief received a rarefied title and married the slim, solemn, sloe-eyed daughter of a lord who, years later, betrayed the king over a black rose and a green sword, and took the throne for a fortnight, during which time he set down thirteen laws so simple, elegant, and easy to obey that lawyers in neighboring countries died in the night of existential palsy. The new king granted women and foreigners the right to own property and receive income, removed the injunction against men of learning dissecting corpses for the purposes of academic study, placed all fools, jesters, witches, and whores under the crown’s protection and immune from all prosecutions, forgave the debts of the proletariat, but not the aristocracy, reformed the tax code into a system so exquisite it could be expressed only as poetry, wrote a meritocratic exam designed to bring talented commoners into government service, provided for the future education of each child born within the walls of ———— via wholesale liquidation of the Crown’s personal stock of sapphires, ordered seven diabolists of seven different schools to determine some means on earth or below it of preserving his laws in every cranny of the kingdom for seven hundred years, and, once that time had passed, at least safe from invaders with a scion of his house on the throne, before being poisoned by so many nobles at once that he simply exploded over the blancmange he so greatly preferred for his nightly dessert.
Whether, as the stylites insisted, as retribution for such libertine governance on the part of King Blancmange, or, as the cheesemakers gloated, for the guzzling of so much illicit milk on the part of Lord Cowsuck, the Bittern line never again produced more than one child in a generation, and that always a girl, not even after the bonfire of the songbirds, when they were given the crest of the fish-eating bittern to wear in shame for all time, not even once the fact of their being technically within the line of succession had been forgotten by all except the more discerning and scholarly voles in the palace walls, two of the stylites, and by something neither a vole nor a stylite that lived in the granary, not even when the certain child I have mentioned was born with a tower in the place of her torso, all the way to the cleft where a woman becomes a world to the cleft where a throat becomes an intellect, and tore her mother in half with the bricks of her birthing, and called Vnuk, and left alone in her father’s arms while the stars rained stitches of silver into a room hot and sour with death, its floor carpeted in blood and its ceilings chandeliered in blood and its lock so full of clotting that no one could get in for the three days it took to summon the royal locksmith from his pilgrimage, all the while the infant cried and cried for milk that, though it belonged to her, would never come.
Pearl
The smartest, though never the wisest, yet almost certainly the most intolerable man ever born in the universe was named Chancel upon his birth in the village of Nyolc, and Chancel the Sophist upon his adulthood in the grand metropolis of Öt. Like all his people, he was stout, short, and agoraphobic, with a color to him like the flesh of hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, eyes like the bottoms of long-dry wells, and little enough jawline to speak of. By the time he could walk, the boy had already read every book in his village synagogue three times and spoiled the endings, not to mention the middles and beginnings, for everyone else. When the rag-and-bone man came calling with his birch-wheel cart down the thin dirt roads, the thick pastoral sunlight, for which Nyolc is so famous among painters and poets, pooled so heavily in his eyes that he did not notice one of the bundles of rags was rather heavy, and noisy, and squirmy, and named Chancel, until he was halfway down the mountain path to Öt and stuck in a snowstorm. Having no other idea what to do with objects, the rag-and-bone man sold Chancel, along with several yards of muslin and wool shearings as well as four deer femurs and a boiled rabbit skeleton, to an Öttian jewel-thief, for burglary was in those days the most fashionable occupation of Öt, and its various techniques the city’s most valuable export.
By the age of four, Chancel had stolen the Thirteen Treasures of the Common Man from the oligarchs of Öt (these being the first stone knife, the first arrowhead, the sternum of the first mastodon felled by mortal hand, the first woven basket, the first necklace, the charred ashes of the lightning-blasted tree that first revealed the logic of fire, the first wheel, three fossilized berries from the first plant used to narcotic effect, the first snowshoes, the stone on which the first abstracted writing was scribbled, the skull of the first person intentionally murdered, the first leash used on the first tamed wolf, and the first water jug) a
nd used the sternum and the writing stone to keep his table from wobbling. Before the age of six he had married and divorced twice, the second time to the idea of a woman who had not yet been born, of which he grew tired, for it would not stop nagging him. At seven, Chancel had received his doctorate in both alchemy and astrology, having cured Sagittarianism to the satisfaction of his dissertation committee. Shortly thereafter, Chancel the Sophist married for the third time, a young and quite deaf tinker named Clerestory, perhaps the only one who could ever truly give her husband the ultimate expression of love: never once telling him to stop talking or she would scream. Thus finally settled in a house on the high street, an untroubled lady, and absolutely no friends at all, Chancel the Sophist, at nine years old, began work on writing the Amaranthine Bible. On his deathbed, one of his devoted followers asked why he had called it so. The sage Chancel coughed into his hand and answered: amaranthine sounds properly occult and mysterious. I wouldn’t have sold half so many copies of the Sorry, All the Paper in the Shops Was a Bit Green, It Was a Dry Year in the Forests of Tíz I Guess Bible.