The Future Is Blue Read online

  Girolamo Savonarola laughed.

  “You ought to write a book,” he giggled, but when Sergeant Tomek began to strip his charcoal-blue robes from him, the friar began to sob instead.

  Eleventh Terrace: The Sorrowful

  It hits her while she kisses Awo’s naked shoulder, Awo, whose cell Pietta visits far more than any other, though in recent years she’s visited many. She even found Beatrice, who turned out to be very shy and fond of rain. It is something to do, and Pietta is desperate for acts. Acts have befores and afters. They mark her movement through this air and these stones. She has tried other sins, but they are more difficult in Nowhere. She cannot bring herself to envy anyone, and wants for nothing; she cannot eat and she cannot strive. So there is this, and though she feels it only dimly, she holds on very tight.

  Pietta and Awo lie together in the lantern-light of Purgatory and there is a moment when she does not know who she is, not really, and then that moment burns itself out. Pietta remembers the feeling of being Pietta. She remembers being small and she remembers being big. All of the things that ever happened to her stack up in her mind like stones on a sea shore, tottering, tottering…Pietta is getting born in a room with poppies painted on the wall, Pietta is small and delighted and running through the snow, forgetting her mother completely and throwing herself face first into the soft powder, Pietta is receiving her first communion and coughing when she oughtn’t because the incense tickles her nose, and she is helping her father tend his bees in their fields, and she is walking in the woods at night with a boy named Milo, and she is living in a house by the sea with Milo who has grown very distant with her, even though she is pregnant and they should be happy, and Pietta is giving birth to her son in a room with ultramarine flowers next to her bed in a cheap, gold-painted vase, and Pietta is walking in the summer, alone, for once, when she sees a white lizard hiding in the shade of a long, flat stone, and she takes it home and gives it a name and shows it to her son and keeps it in an old fish tank even though Milo says it is stupid and lizards have no hearts and Pietta is wearing her mother’s diamond ring every day even though they could use the money because no amount of snow could make her forget, not really, and Milo is so angry with her so often, every thing she does is the wrong thing, and though she still loves him she grows very still inside, she feels as though she is trapped in ice and cannot move, even as she cooks and cleans and runs to the shops and teaches her classes and she is getting older all the time and then Pietta is teaching her son to play chess with a set made to look like a famous medieval set with funny-looking people in funny-looking chairs, she is cutting out the green felt for his Halloween costume because he insists upon being a tree this year, she is pouring herself the last of the red wine and locking up the liquor cabinet with a brass key, she is putting away her husband’s clothes, his coats, his socks, his old belt, and thinking that she should have bought him a new one long ago, and she will now, she will, because tomorrow will be the day she wakes up out of the ice and becomes herself again, she knows it will happen all at once, like a big silver fruit cracking open, and there she’ll be, good as new, even though she thought the same yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and when the glazier’s truck hits Pietta in the high street she thinks, for a moment, that all that beautiful, shattered, colored glass lying around her is the ice breaking at last, the fruit breaking open, with Pietta whole and alive inside, but it is not.

  Twelfth Terrace: The Gluttonous

  It was a quiet night in Nowhere.

  Detective Inspector Belacqua and Corporal Tomek shared the watch and supper and half a bottle of white wine which both felt very excited about. The lamp stood full of oil, the basin full of fresh water, the pens full of ink, and all was as it should be.

  Belacqua had many times almost asked his raven-headed friend how he felt about their one great case. Tomek never mentioned it. Occasionally, in their rounds, they would catch a glimpse of Savonarola, naked and shunned, drifting miserably among the crowds. Once, Belacqua himself had nearly run right into the woman called Awo, who stared at him as though she could punch through his delicate skull with her gaze. He hadn’t been able to bear that; he’d run. Run, from a local, a dead woman with nothing but her rags. And yet it had happened.

  So time, in its shapeless, corpulent, implacable way, bore on in Nowhere. And only when he was alone did it trouble Belacqua how much they never understood about the incident, the monstrous hole at the bottom of the case file through which everything sensible tumbled out. Into this hole, he began to drop the words of his novel, one by one, painstakingly, the only story he knew, a story without an end. Which, he supposed, was to be expected, considering the author.

  When it came time to open the bottle of white wine, the policemen found the cork encased in awfully thick black wax, too thick for fingernails and too awkward for beaks.

  “Nothing to it,” Corporal Tomek laughed, and drew a small pair of scissors out of the inner pocket of his coat. He worked the little blades deftly round the mouth and wiggled them up underneath till the cake of wax fell away.

  They were a perfectly ordinary pair of scissors. A little tarnished and stained, but utterly usual and serviceable, like Tomek himself. Detective Inspector Belacqua had no reason to notice them in the least. And yet, he did. He could not stop noticing them. Small enough for delicate work. For carving. Was that tarnish, that black smear along the shears?

  Belacqua cleared his throat. “Has it ever woken you nights, Tomek, that we never discovered how the old man did it?”

  “Did what, sir?”

  “Killed a dead woman. There had to be a method—that’s the whole thing, you know, means, motive, and opportunity—that’s the entire thing of it. And the means just…got away from us, didn’t it?”

  “I suppose it did. But I wouldn’t worry. It’s never happened again. It’s not like we had an epidemic on our hands, Belacqua. And if we had, well, you know. No one harmed but the dead. The chief would have sorted it out, I’m sure.” Tomek poured the wine and handed a glass across the desk. Belacqua just looked at it.

  “I just want to know, that’s all. Haven’t you ever wanted to know anything so badly it ate you away until there was nothing left of you but the not knowing?”

  The raven grimaced. “Just drink your wine, Detective Inspector.”

  Belacqua did not blink. He thought he ought to feel something in the pit of his stomach, but all he felt was the not knowing, the canker of it, working its way through him like rot.

  “How did you meet her?” Detective Inspector Belacqua whispered.

  Tomek put down the glasses, very carefully, as though, in his hands, they might break.

  Thirteenth Terrace: The Lustful

  Pietta bludgeons the wall over and over, jamming her scissors into the wine-dark stone. Chips and chunks fly away as she gouges the skin of the city. The thudding and scraping of her blows fill the endless halls of Taedium.

  They care about very little, Pietta knows. But they will care about this. Vandalizing Nowhere brings them running, so she is not surprised when a man with the head of a raven steps through her door and snatches the scissors from her hands with a strength that would snap all the bones of her wrist, if the bones of her wrist could still break.

  “That’s enough, miss,” Sergeant Tomek says crisply, professionally. Their faces are close as kissing. Raven and girl; pale, bloodless lips and a mouth like black shears.

  “It’s not fair,” Pietta snarls at him. “All I ever did wrong was be sad.”

  Outside, the man on the mountain eats his smoke. Tomek is on top of her by the time he begins to move his arms in straight, strident lines, and she does not see.

  P-I-E-T-T-A?

  Fourteenth Terrace: The Contemptuous

  “We all have our ways of coping with it,” Tomek said, running his finger around the lip of his glass.

  “With what?” Belacqua scowled.

  “Eternity,” answered the raven slowly. “You
have your novel—oh, for God’s sake, we all know. I have my research. It’s wrong, you know, everything, all of this. At least they lived, fucked something up well and good enough to end up here. We’re here…for what? Why? To punish what sin? The only difference between them and us is we wear better clothes. I can’t bear it any more than they can. And it’s worse, it’s worse for us, Belacqua. We’ve just enough spark in us to draw up a rough sketch of feeling, just a basic set, nothing too detailed: duty, loyalty, a smear of free will, a little want, a little envy, just enough to know somebody else got to see what a summer looks like, but not enough for the cosmos to even look at us, for one second, as anything but lock and keys. And it never ends for us. Don’t you see? They all have the hope of progress, of the climb. This is it, just this, nothing else, forever. I was so bored, Belacqua.”

  Tomek began to pace, tugging at his feathers, half-preening, half-tearing.

  “And so I began to think. Just for the last couple of thousand years. I began to plan a way to murder a person. It’s a big enough problem to take up centuries. Could it even be done? They can’t, certainly. One punches the other in the nose and it’s like punching ice cream. Nothing. Not even a mark. But I am a strigil. There is no record of what I can do because no one has ever cared enough to find out. Do your job, little birdie, get back to us at the end of everything for your performance review. What would happen if a strigil sinned? Would there be consequences? And if I could do it, if, ontologically speaking, it would be allowed to occur, how? These are worthy questions! The first experiment was obvious. I broke a man’s neck in Oboedientia Sector. For a minute, I thought I’d gotten it right on my first go. But no, he just sort of shivered and put his head right and went on his way. It seemed the rules held for me as well as him. After that I kept it all in my head. The project. I thought it out while the Renaissance idiots poured in, while I walked my beat, while I watched you fumble with a sad little dime store potboiler in the corner like one of the chronic masturbators down in Desidia. Nothing physical would do it. I should have realized that—we do not move in the realm of the physical. I had to act upon the nature of a soul, to alter it so that it could not remain whole. And it would work—Belacqua, this is the important thing! It would work because of that smear of free will, that tiny table scrap of self a strigil owns. I have to be able to act freely, or else I could not arrest or judge or mete out punishment. You have to be allowed to plunk away at your silly stories, because not even the font of all can build a being of judgment without building a being of perversity.”

  Tomek put his hands on the window sill and let the wind off the mud plain buffet his face.

  “When I met Pietta I knew she would let me do anything to her. She was in despair. They all are, for awhile, but hers was frozen and depthless, a continuation of who she had always been, just spooling on into the black forever. And she was right. It’s not fair. It’s all grotesque. That little spit of living and all this ocean of penance. She wanted it, Belacqua. She did.”

  “I doubt that very much, Corporal.”

  “You don’t understand. She didn’t care. She saw the writing on the wall and the writing said: Fuck This Place. She just wanted something to happen. We ran through all the sins first. I fucked her right away—small mercy that we are not built sexless as the angels. Lust is the easiest. I cleaned out the automat and shoved it all down her throat till cream and syrup and relish and grease poured down her chest. She puked it all up, of course, the dead can’t eat. Then on to the next like kids at a fairground—we hurled loathing and envy at each other, at the mountain, perfectly honest, more profanity than grammar could hold. I drew up a rage and beat her though no bruises came up. We skipped sloth since Nowhere is the home and hearth of sloth, and Belacqua, nothing I could do could make that woman proud. But it was all useless anyway, her flesh took it all as calmly as water. And so I had to retreat and think again.

  “Solutions come so strangely, Belacqua. They steal in. Just the way you saw my scissors and knew what I’d done, your mind leaping over your habits and your inertia to arrive at a conclusion that is as much dream as logic, I knew. I knew how to kill my Pietta. I returned to her that night. I held her in my arms, and, one by one, I buried her in virtues. I gave her all my belongings freely and her nose shot blood onto the flagstones. I cradled her chastely with no thought of her body and bruises rose up on her thighs. I groveled before her and before her I was nothing, and her fingers snapped. I tended her patiently while she screamed, and upomovn carved itself into her back. I persevered, and my diligence choked her like hands. I whispered to her all the kindnesses her husband withheld, that her son, being a child, could not imagine, and the extraordinary thing was I meant them, Belacqua. I meant them with all my being. I loved her and her throat split side to side like a pomegranate. Then I shoved her out the window and watched her fall. I pushed her from this world, and all the violence on her body was but the marks of her passage. Neither virtue nor sin can be committed in this place. Nowhere cannot bear it. What they do to one another matters little enough—they have chosen their course and proceed along it, stupid and wasteful and unfair as it is. But I am neither alive nor dead, neither mortal nor immortal, just meanly made, with the barest thought. And so are you, Belacqua. The meanly made may sin—who could expect better? Sin is easy. But for me—for us—to act with virtue is a violence to the whole of existence. And now she is gone and my questions answered. Nothing happened. I was not punished. I was not even found out. I am not morally culpable, because He will not deign to look at me long enough to condemn. When an angel does wrong, Hell must be invented out of whole cloth to contain his sorry carcass. But we? We are nothing, and no one. And I think it is beautiful.”

  Fifteenth Terrace: The Forgetful

  There is a grinding sound before she appears, like stone against stone. One moment there is nothing, the next there is Pietta, though if she heard that name now, she would not recognize it, nor even comprehend the idea of a word used to signify a person. Her mind is a silver fruit lying clean and open, without seed or rot or juice. She opens her eyes and her eyes are black, black and several, ringed round her skull like a crown so that she sees everywhere at once. She moves her legs and her legs are powerful, shaggy, heavy with silver, braided, matted fur. Her claws and her tusks scrape on the bedrock beneath the mudplain as she moves with the sleuth of other bears, because nothing in this place has ever happened only once, their ursine sounds and their scents stretching before them toward the city they love but no longer understand, except that it is a warm place in the night, a heart beating in a bloodless land, and when they touch the walls, they remember, faintly, distantly, the feeling of being loved.

  Sixteenth Terrace: The Unyielding

  Detective Inspector Belacqua gave the signal, and every window in Nowhere closed against the man with the raven’s head. Tomek’s caws and cries far below echoed the length of everything, his pleas, his reasons, all of it swallowed by the grey clouds and the long nothing-and-no-one of the endless mudplain and the red stars beyond. The mountain, for a moment, stood silent, all the lights still and dim.

  Belacqua wept against the shutters, and he wept for a century before opening them again.

  Two and Two

  is Seven

  Maribel lived alone in the Valley of N.

  She preferred living alone and she preferred the Valley of N to any other state of being or geographical happenstance she could imagine for herself. It seemed to her that she and the Valley of N had been made to suit one another, like a six-fingered glove and a six-fingered girl. Such a glove would be useless to anyone with five fingers, or three, or eleven, and such a girl would find a glove designed for a two, four, or seven fingered person impossible. Except for her ninety-nine misfortunes, she considered her existence complete and perfect.

  Maribel lived in a neglected nonagonal nunnery, in the Neoclassical style, nestled into the nook of the Valley of N. Nine tame waterfalls ran obediently out of the mountains to feed
her domestic hydraulics. She kept a garden of nectarine and nutmeg trees, navy bean runners, prickly nopalitos, nightshades of every description, and leafy, spicy green nettles. Very few animals lived in the valley full-time, for Maribel startled and upset them, though she never meant to. But occasionally, some tourists happened by. Narcoleptic nightingales would sing briefly in her garden, nitwitted newts would nod off on the flat rocks, nihilistic numbats would nuzzle under thickets, nostalgic natterjack toads would croak of days long gone by, and nimble nyala with twisted horns would graze nervously on the nutritious narcissus and noble nasturtiums that grew so well at the mouth of the valley, before bolting off to someplace where Maribel wasn’t.

  This was nineteenth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: no animal could love her.

  Each morning, Maribel rose with the sun and went about her obligations. She took her obligations extremely seriously, though the King had not come to inspect the workings of the Valley of N for many years. In the beginning, he had come almost every day. He could hardly wait to leave his noisy, crowded palace in the City of T and sink into the peace and beauty of the Valley of N. The King would tinker in the nunnery like a common husband, mend the pipes and hang new doors, chase the nearsighted nutria from the thatching, whitewash the stone path that wound all the length of the green valley floor. Then he would walk up and down the path with his hands clasped behind his back, listening to the joys and grievances of the citizens he had brought to settle here, and tell Maribel how proud he was of her work.

  This was ninth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: that the King never visited her anymore.

  Some nights in the nunnery, she almost convinced herself that he never would return, and hang him for a penny anyway. She could do what she liked now, even neglect or abuse the other citizens of the Valley of N, even neglect them forever, or kill them outright, seeing they really were such a bother. But then she would hear a branch crack in the deep woods beyond the garden of nectarines, a crack like the one she would hear if a large royal foot were to fall in the forest, and guilt would flood her insides like a flash storm, and the next morning she would put on her nocknail boots like always, balance her basket on her hip, and make her rounds.