For the love of hell, do not look at any news today.  In other sad things, David Lynch has passed away, and I had one thought on that.  And if you want to read this novel from the beginning, see this article, read it, and hit the next button until you see more entries.  Meanwhile…

–

Bugaster Mallor’s house was the only place large enough to comfortably accommodate guests in the little algae farming village of Alish, which had the humbling effect of making the head of government into an occasional innkeep.  But in a sense, it was a privilege to host people from far away, to enjoy a greater share of the company of people you had never met, while most of Alish’s people were all too familiar with each other.

Construction in the wind-scoured hills needed to either have flexibility to bend in the wind, or solidity enough to stand unbowed – the middle ground would lead to disaster.  Most of the village’s houses had solid vertical metal beams sunk deep in the ground, but intentionally left unjoined by inflexible material to prevent cracking.  The rest of the structure would be layered flexible materials, with the outermost layers mostly a shiny corrugated white plastic.  The Bugasters grand house was, instead, built like a castle.  Not a large castle, but one with extremely thick stone walls, enameled with scallops of the same white plastic as the rest of the village.  All the openings in that stone were layered and sealed with perfect engineering to render the interior nearly immune to the discomforts of the weather.  You couldn’t open most of the heavy windows without machinery, but they let in the light and kept out the snow.

It had two levels above ground and one beneath, with the upper level reserved for the rooms that had to be the most impressive.  The three largest were the ballroom and the living rooms of the master suite and the guest suite, each topped with a clear dome, having microstructure that resisted accumulations of snow and ice.  When the lights were all off at night, through them you could see the stars.  When the lights were on, they provided only strange fishbowl reflections of the rooms beneath – lavishly appointed with eclectic furnishings and decor, over lacquered colorful stone tile reminiscent of riverbeds, lit by an assortment of warm white lamps shaped like tall rectangles and cylinders, and three huge decorative heating tanks, which each looked like a sequence of frosted translucent glass dominos that slowly pulsed with yellow-orange glow, as the chemicals within swirled and cycled through warming and cooling phases.

On a great couch mounded with furs, the sisters lay at opposite ends, Josefina with Ombunculita across her lap.  They still wore the finery from the endless party, but the details were getting shabby.  To survive the social pain, they had drunk to excess, and were nearing the limit of their consciousness.  But they hadn’t enough of each other’s company by the time the party ended, and so they shooed Umbrifer and Darter to their rooms, and dwelled in that fancy room a while longer.

Ombunculita snored soft and high-pitched, sounding more like a housepet than a human-derived creature.  Josefina would drift off, then get snapped back to bleary consciousness by a word from Blasfemia, then the same thing in reverse, over and over, allowing that family reunion to happen in slow motion.

“Josefina, hermana, what was in the Torre?  I just… can’t imagine what you were doing, with no food or water or fire…  For how many months?”

“Mm?”  She tried to open her eyes, roll her head to look more fully at Blasfemia.  “Witchery, hermanita.  You know how Umbrifer came from the astrocielo?  Before it did that, it did not need to eat or drink or breathe.  Spirits only pretend to do these things, like a feeling to experience.”

“Huh?”

“I was in the spirit, so I lived like a spirit.  I thought I was thirsty, but I wasn’t really drinking.  Everything around me was an illusion, but illusions were all my body needed.”

“God damn, that’s trippy.”  The answer didn’t satisfy her, but it did help her realize that no answer would.  She began to drift off.

“Hey.  Why did you ask?”

Blasfemia stirred with a snort.  “What did I ask?”

“About the Torre Alucine.  What it was like.”

“Oh, just, I still think about it, all the time.  I can’t stop thinking about them, back in the Stars.  Just planet after planet of jerks, being gross to you.  I thought …  it was smart to come to the Heathen Worlds.  These jokers don’t speak no language you’d see in Church bullshit.  How could they know about that crap?  They can’t.”

“That wasn’t the only reason I came here.”

“How did you end all the way outside the Ice?”

“I ran away to Abuela, told her everything.  She doesn’t watch tele, you know?  I felt like I was burning alive, like nowhere could ever be safe, like I should just die but I didn’t want to kill myself.”

Blasfemia shed a tear but didn’t say anything.  “Mmhm.”

“So she told me that the answer was to find peace with myself.  Some stuff like, every soul is alone, no matter who we’re with, so we all need to find peace with ourselves.  I needed to know myself to get through it all.  And being young, it made things harder.  She said when you live a long time, it happens all by itself.  But kids are too new, have changed so much so many times when they grow up, they don’t know who they are.”

“That does sound wise.  Maybe she isn’t just a freaky old weirdo.”

Josefina smiled.  “She’s a freaky old weirdo, but not just that, yeah…  Basically, I went to the Torre Alucine to experience some vision of my life that was so intense, it would show me who I am, without having to wait around for years to figure it out.”

“I know who you are, hermana.  You’re a funny lady with weird ideas, weird friends, weird things you like to do.  But you’re so nice, just the sweetest person in the world.  I can’t live without you anymore, OK?”  She reached out a hand, grasping at the air, but neither of them were in a condition to get up and make the physical connection just then.

Josefina made a grasping hand gesture as well.  I squeeze your hand.  Then she returned that hand to Ombunculita’s little ribs, and she shifted in her sleep.  “You do know me, but that looks a little different from inside my head.  And another funny thing about the Torre – I can see things now, so clear.  The ideals are everywhere.  It’s overwhelming, but also…  I can just let it wash over me.  Like a drop of water is too cold, but when you get all the way into the water, it’s less of a shock.”

“Is that intuitive stuff again?”

“I know.  I’ll shut up about it…  What about you?  I didn’t want to leave you, but I couldn’t do anything for anybody when it was like that.  Sounds like you got in the worst kind of trouble.  How the hell did it happen?”

“Aren’t you supposed to just know?”

“Not like that.  What I don’t get is that… you’re so wild, people treat you like a dangerous animal.  No way you just sweet-talked your way onto an astronave bound for the Walled City.  How did it happen?”

“Well, whenever people were being gross about you, I would cuss them out, or hit them.  But it was everybody, everywhere, all the time!  So they could laugh it off, because how can I punch everyone?  They felt safe in a big bunch like that.  Until I started hurting them, started killing angels.”

“Oh no,” Josefina said softly.  She bit her lips.

“All the places in town got angels, you know, like hospitals and fire stations and the tele station, whatever.  So I’m making a scene downtown and the angel of the tele station actually came out in the street to make fun of me.  You know what I can do.  It was a big fuckin’ mistake.”

“That’s when you changed your name.”

“I told them if God doesn’t like you, I don’t like God.  I killed some angels, killed some guys, got put in jail.”

“Was there a jailbreak?  Bunch of convicts hijacked an astronave and went after the pope?”

“No convicts.  These college kids.  Big revolutionaries.  They got me out, took me to Dio 6.  Anyway, I didn’t know it was going to mess up the world.  Who would know that?  A pope’s just a guy.  It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“I’m sorry, hermanita.  Well, I’m sure it’ll all settle down eventually.  Like, the astrocielo, the politics of it all.  Not life for you and me, though.  We’re just done for.  Old lives over, no home left in the Stars.  But long space is long.  We can find a place where they’ll never find us.”

Blasfemia covered her face in a pillow.

“Are you OK, baby?”

“I blew it, huh?”

“If it was just what happened to me, we could live forever as whipping girls.  But what you did can never be forgiven.  They’ll want to kill you so bad.  Don’t let ’em do it, Ximura.  I need you, too.”

“Ugggh,” she punched the pillow away, “It should be like a school fight.  Each side has a guy.  Me versus the pope.  Whoever wins wins, and it’s fucking over.  I beat them fair and square.  How are they going to act like they got any right to get me now?  Put up another guy, I’ll kill him too.”

Josefina sighed.  “You hafta learn this lesson, mija.  You gotta get it through your head.  Nothing is like a school fight.  That’s not how it works.  You can’t just trade punches ’til it’s over, because the Universe will never run out of punch guys, so it’ll never be over.”

“I hate it.”

“At least now you know.”

Blasfemia closed her eyes and tried to let the booze soak up the bad feelings.  It didn’t work as well as she’d hoped.

Josefina said, “I love you.  Try to think about something else…  So you finally met my Abuela, huh?  What did you think about that?”

She chuckled.  “Those little clone monkeys are so gross.  At least when you have a baby it’ll grow up to take care of itself.  Is Ombonculita ever gonna grow up to be something?  God, I don’t even want to imagine.  They freak me out.  Cora freaked me out.”

“That’s her science.  Life.  She knows some other brujeria, but she actually studied biology at a University, I think.”

“What did she do to herself?  No way she looked like that when she was in school.”

“Vanity.  To make herself look young, with magic… the methods are far from perfect.”

“You’re tellin’ me.  She looks like somebody blew a baby head up like a balloon and stuck it on a kid with old people skin.  I just can’t help but think where that’s all goin’.  When she gets too old to do stuff for herself, when she dies and all the monkeys need to eat.”  She shuddered.

“Aww.”  Josefina wondered herself, but didn’t want to dwell on the subject.  “She made me this one, so I could have her with me forever.  It is her, more than a child would be.  It really has something of her inside it.  I don’t really understand what or how.  But it’s very interesting.”

“Don’t let me ever be interesting, Josie.”

By and by, they sorted themselves out for the night.  The sisters shared a bed, some little fear of being taken away from each other again, but they would likely start sleeping apart soon.  Who knows when Josefina would start bedding weirdos again?  And Blasfemia wasn’t as wild in romance, but would surely like the privacy to pursue love when they arose.

The awkwardness on Borland 1 did not improve with time.  They were most interesting thing to happen for an age, in that village of Alish.  Nobody would leave the visitors alone.  Day in, day out, cultural exchanges and learning experiences, and pleasantry so false none could believe it, yet it was necessary, enforced by the charitable nature of their stay.

Darter and Umbrifer learned to speak without translators, and became as thick as thieves.  Unfortunately for the sisters, they lost the excuse of language barrier, because the boys had worked out a translator from Borlante to Corazono and back.  Anybody in town could get their mobile to read each other’s words.

Blasfemia and Josefina began drinking to excess, though Josefina reined it in when once she badly distressed Ombunculita, by neglecting her for several hours.  When she could slip away from other obligations, Josefina spent some time studying the Leveret, seeing if she could talk with her.

One day she was there, Ombonculita over her shoulder, watching the machine spirit sleep.  The sky was overcast but not snowing at the moment, though the earth was still, as always, blanketed in white.  The Leveret was strange but beautiful, every mechanism and detail decorative in one way or another.  Josefina stroked one of the giant horse heads, with gloved hand, running her fingers through the grooves in the sculpture.  Where did the spirit end and the machine begin?  How had the machine been formed in the first place?  Wasn’t like the astrocielo had body shops, that she knew of.

The Leveret stirred within her metal.  There was no movement to see, just a vibration that Josefina could feel.  Josie said, “Good morning, guapa,” and listened for a response.  Nothing, but that wasn’t how she communicated with Umbrifer either, was it?

Umbrifer had given her a code to get into the astronave, when they had been keeping Ombonculita’s diapers and other supplies in there.  She used her mobile to transmit it, then clambered inside – careful not to bump the homunculus.

Josefina sat in the pilot seat, and looked over the control panel.  There was a resting spot on the dashboard for tools, beverages, and such.  She sat Ombunculita there, and took off her parka.  “How does this all work?”  She didn’t know why the question came out that way; it wasn’t what she really wanted to know.  She just wanted to talk with the Leveret – or if it was a nonverbal spirit, commune with her feelings.

Ombunculita was bored, but that was so much of her life that she had a way of dealing with it.  She just laid her hands in her lap, let her head loll, and spaced out.  Josefina had gotten used to it, was less worried when it happened, and thus able to focus on her current interest.  She touched the controls.

Another reaction.  Some kind of sound, from farther back in the craft.  She wasn’t sure if it was audible in the material world, or was a spirit perception.  She took off her gloves and began again.  As she touched each switch, each knob, each lever, she sensed their purpose, as if the Leveret’s body was her own, and she was feeling part of that body move.  It was intriguing, and she kept brushing her fingers back and forth over the controls, letting the ideas jumble and overlap, and add up to an impression of the whole thing, grinning foolishly.

Behind her, more sounds, and lights flicked on.  A groan in the belly of the craft became a groan in her own stomach, and she stopped cold.  For some reason, she instinctively gripped the helm with both hands as she did.

I need food.  Please.

She couldn’t help but reply to the Leveret through her own feelings.

I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry I woke you up, because I have no food for you now.

What came back was a vague sadness, with no concrete idea attached.  Josefina’s face was miserable, and Ombunculita did an impression of it.

She asked the Leveret, Can you go back to sleep?  I will leave you alone.

She powered down with a spiritual sigh.

Josefina heard the hatch open, and someone hastily scrambling to get in.  She had come to recognize the sound of Umbrifer’s paws on metal, and spun the chair to face it.

Umbrifer’s eye was furious, kitty mouth in a wild grimace.  “What did you do?”

Josefina had done nothing of consequence, but when Umbrifer realized that she could operate the Leveret, it felt threatened in a way it had never experienced.  Its lifestyle was such that threats of violence or death were not unusual, but the possibility of its ship flying away with someone else?

The unlikelihood of that happening was the only thing that kept it from being a total blowup, but Umbrifer soon found itself tempted to excess drink as well, bumming around the village with Darter.  It found the bar scene, where Blasfemia had, in Josefina’s absence, begun to party with the village toughs, and it receded into the shadows there.

The bar was all armwrestling and knife-throwing and sloppy dancing.  The big man Carr seemed to all the natural recipient for Blasfemia’s affections.  Why shouldn’t the town’s best man get the most interesting new lady?  But she didn’t let anyone monopolize her attention, even in a drunken state.

The most ardent were Kabel – a big woman with close-cropped hair, Carr – though he tried to act less eager than he was, and Dab and Blagh – two handsome young guys who were kind of indistinguishable to her eyes, as pleasant as they tried to be.

Dab said, “I swear, these knives of yours are making themselves fly true.  Why else would you have less accuracy with the house knives?”

She read his words off her mobile, which sat on the table amid towering mugs of alcohol.  “Think I’m cheating, Dab?”

He smiled at her over his own mobile.  It was a strange scene whenever people gathered around one of the women, everybody looking up and down over and over again.  “Not a problem because we can all just use the same knives, but I’d like to see how it works.  May I?”

Kabel and some other random toughs were also squeezed in around the table, jesting and drinking.  Kabel was drinking away her jealousy, more shy than the boys in vying for Blasfemia’s time.

Blasfemia handed him one of her tools, in its typical knife blade form.  Before she sat it down, she turned it into a chisel and back, to demonstrate its qualities to those who didn’t know.  Its knife shape was very consistent, seemingly down to the millimeter.

But Dab put it down on the table, and with one of the house knives, scored a line around it.  Then he handed it back to her.  “Throw it, and I will fetch it for you.”

She stood, readied herself in front of the target, and announced her intention to throw.  “Klate!”  It was one of few words she had learned in Borlante.  Hitting the target was not at all difficult.  The experienced throwers in the bar usually increased the challenge by getting drunk first.  Blasfemia wasn’t drunk enough to miss by an amusing amount at that time.

Dab brought it back to the table and sat it down, tracing its outline again in the same spot on the table.

“Stoppy tabbly glayig, yun zock!,” the barkeep yelled.

Everybody laughed it off, and people at the table leaned in to witness.  The knife had subtly changed shape when the threw it, the weight of the blade shifting its balance.  It was most noticeable where the curve altered course along the leading edge – under normal circumstances, the transition was smooth; in the thrown form, it had become a corner.

Blasfemia put the knife away and rubbed her head.  “I had no idea…”

Conversation gradually turned again to the Company caravan, as Blasfemia was unwilling to say much honest about what lay behind her.  She was bored about the Company caravan.  People were far too comfortable repeating themselves in that little village.

It was set to happen before their hundred days elapsed. A Company caravan would visit the village, and levy its tax of protection money, among other forms of banditry. As long as they left enough to live on, the Alishers had no intention of rocking that boat. But would it be enough to live on? And should a conflict arise, just what were the visitors capable of?

Blasfemia was dismissive.  In part, because she knew Josefina, Umbrifer, and Ombunculita were dead weight in a fight.  In part, because all she wanted to do was take Josefina and leave – find some place to live with more to eat than reconstituted protozoa.

The awkwardness didn’t stop.

And in the background, a big pink eye would occasionally look her way, in annoyance.  Umbrifer asked Darter, in their shared hybrid language, “You used belong to this Company.  Do you think the caravan will cause trouble while we are here?”

“I really don’t know.  I’ll say this: it’s not like a war.  Just a little dust-up.  If everyone is careful, nothing horrible happens.”

“What’s careful?”

“Be submissive when someone else has a gun, but also unyielding – don’t look like moving through you is going to be easy enough to be worth it.  It’s a tough balance and nobody can do it perfect every time.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve done that.  I’m pretty good at it, actually.  But if we mess up, what’s a horrible thing?”

“Rape, murder, the farm gets messed up and people starve.  Sometimes it’ll just be a couple of tragedies, like, the bastards will be OK with a tribute of suffering.  Messing up one victim while everybody else has to watch.  If it blows up, that’s when more people get hurt.”

It covered its eye.  “Ugh.”  It looked at Blasfemia’s little group of drunks again.  “Why does the Company always win in these stories?  Better weapons?  More soldiers?”

“Yeah.  Even if a village wins, it loses, because they’ll send more guys the next time.  Again, if the bugaster is smooth, submissive but not yielding, and there’s any question about how much it would hurt, the Company might let it go, with just a tribute of pain for their trouble.  Better to not win a fight with them in the first place, not have to depend on that negotiation.”

“I’ve got a problem, Darter.”

“Yes, Umbrifer?”

“If there’s a fight, Blasfemia might be able to help them win.  She has done things that you would never believe.  And this is good, because we could leverage that to purchase my fuel, and leave here.”

“But if you win a fight and leave here, we are defenseless against the Company’s next move.”

“What’s it like, being dead?”

–