Totem Poles Read online

  The twelve copies of Mumbai failed to appear. Instead, there was only one copy of Mumbai, botched and glitchy, and shoehorned higgledy-piggledy into the streets and intersections of an existing sector of the town. The intended replica of the core metropolis consisted of 7,777 Royal Taj hotels.

  These sumptuous and vacant lodgings were immediately set upon by the angry Indians whose access streets had been built over. They now had to climb over the tops of buildings to get in and out of their homes. The citizens didn’t know whom to blame for their urban mishap, but they knew they’d been disadvantaged by some typical big-city swindle. Some of them settled into the massed new hotels’ million-plus rooms. Others began diligently stripping out carpets, doorknobs, towels, soap, and brass bathroom fixtures.

  Adroitly dodging the burst of public anger, Puneet and Leela crept incognito into one of the 7,777 bridal suites. They were drained by their intricate marriage ceremony—and dejected over Puneet’s bungling. Their initial attempt at sexual congress was desultory.

  “Let’s lie low,” said Puneet, sprawling on the wadded satin sheets. “Until the Mumbai corruption squads become bored with searching for scapegoats. Our fresh new married life should be about propriety, stability and impeccable Hindu values. No more saucer grubs. Just rice, coriander and chamomile tea.”

  Leela clumsily adjusted her incendiary wedding-night nylon-and-satin lingerie, which was a rumpled splash of sexy vermilion in the hotel’s saffron sheets. “I can write a press release blaming the Dodeca-Mumbai mix-up on that plume of grubs from the Ukraine. I’ve been in touch with a Russian woman who just arrived from there. She noticed our saucer lizard logo and she wants to meet the lizard herself. She has some odd notion about rebirth. Anyway, she’s offering me diamond earrings.”

  “Birth?” said Puneet, always a half-step behind. “This reminds me of the fertility festival I’d mentioned. All singing, all-dancing, very fine. I’ll take the stage and announce that my new bride is on the way to bearing me a son and heir! Thereby bringing us sympathy. The sooner the better, Leela.”

  “I knew you would request this, Puneet, but the time is not right. I’m a successful businesswoman, embroiled with international intrigue.”

  Puneet raised a chiding finger. “Human fertility is the one blessing that flying saucers can never bring! You must bear us two sons, seven, twelve!”

  Leela immediately locked herself in the suite’s large bathroom.

  “What are you doing in there?” called Puneet plaintively.

  “All will be well, dear husband,” said Leela. Her voice was indistinct through the heavy, gilt door. “I’m consulting expert counsel.”

  Time passed. Puneet watched television, which consisted entirely of 20th century satellite reruns from China and Brazil. And now someone was pounding on the hallway door. Puneet opened up to find an attractive white woman standing there. She had smooth, pale skin, a lustrous bob of dark hair, and a writhing, bandage-wrapped package cradled in both her arms. It resembled a mummified crocodile.

  “Did you lose this?” said Ida, in Russian-accented English.

  “That’s mine!” cried Puneet. “That’s my magic saucer lizard, it’s the source of all my business!”

  The Russian woman tenderly set the writhing mummy onto the marital bed.

  Leela unlocked the bathroom door and pranced into the hotel suite. She was still in her wedding lingerie, and had tidied her hair and make-up.

  “This is the Russian woman you were talking about?” Puneet asked Leela.

  “I phoned her for help,” said Leela.

  “Help with what?” said Puneet. “We were doing fine here! We just got married!”

  “Does that make you the master of life and death?” put in Ida, rolling her glorious eyes in disdain. “While you frolic in satin sheets, a Russian hero gave his life for mankind!” She turned to Leela. “Open the windows. A miracle is at hand. A redemption. A resurrection.”

  Leela obeyed at once. The low, city-lit clouds were roiling with dark energy, swirling with an almighty monsoon of flying scraps and silver shreds. Ukrainian saucer grubs hailed in through the open windows, mounding upon the twitching silver crocodile in the bed. The grubs merged into a mass that split open, and—

  “A son for me?” cried Puneet.

  No. It was Kalinin. His eyes glowed like the staring orbs of a painted Byzantine icon.

  “Oh darling,” said Ida, hurrying forward and kissing his pale lips.

  “We’re going to America,” said Kalanin, pulling free.

  * * *

  Ida and Kalinin walked hand-in hand down a waterfront street in the grotty south end of San Francisco. It was a fine summer night, nearly dawn, with a full moon on the horizon. They’d been to an art party. There had been wine. And a smorgasbord of barbecued saucer grubs.

  “I love the sight of saucers now,” said Kalinin, gazing into the haunted, moonlit sky. He still had his beaky nose and his high cheekbones. His teeth were straighter than before, and he spoke English. His passage through the phantom world of the saucer-beings had changed him other, less definable ways. He said odd things, and he had a heavy aura.

  Kalinin had told Ida that he was one of twelve resurrected saucer saints—twelve saints scattered across the surface of the Earth—and that he could hear the voices of the other saints within his head at all times. But Ida and Kalinin kept these secrets from those around them. They walked among humankind like an ordinary woman and man.

  Silvered by the low moon, a nearby saucer’s energetic surface was a ceaseless flurry of subtle, mercurial patterns, like wave-chop, or like the scales of a swimming fish.

  “You always understood them better than anyone else, Kalinin,” said Ida. “Do they plan to annihilate us? Is that why they sent you back?”

  “They’re refining us,” said Kalinin. “Like ore within a crucible. Like vapor in an alembic. Life and death are philosophical mistakes.”

  “Sometimes I miss the old Kalinin,” said Ida. “It was noble to be so stubborn. Fighting the inevitable, no matter what.”

  “Discarded dross,” said Kalinin. “Economics, government, military power—nonsensical, distorted, irrelevant.” Imposing as he seemed to others, when he gazed at Ida, his eyes were as warm as ever before. “Love remains. Art is the path to the final unification.”

  “Everyone at the party was saying things like that,” said Ida, shrugging her bared shoulders in her shining gown. “People are so full of themselves in America! They talk as if they were demigods, but what do they do? They crank themselves up on grubs and watch someone’s thousand-hour video in ten minutes.”

  “A mirage that flies by, half-seen, half-sensed,” said Kalanin. “The saucers want a richer kind of art. They want us to change the world.”

  “But Kalinin, what if the saucers are like children who poke sticks into anthills to watch the ants seethe? The ants build and build, they strive and strive—but are any of them famous artists?”

  “We’ll craft a great work of ant,” said Kalanin.

  “Everyone at the party was talking about totem poles,” said Ida. “In the old days, the Native Americans of the northwest carved faces on sticks with stone knives. That was their art. But then, one day—one strange day—the sailing ships came to them, and strangers brought them steel axes. How did they respond? They made huge totem pole logs, from Oregon to Alaska!”

  “Totem poles,” said Kalinin slowly. “Yes. Of course. Totem poles are good.”

  “But the story is tragic! The old world that the natives knew by heart became someone else’s New World. A world of syphilis and smallpox, with the totem poles stored in museums.”

  “The grubs are our steel axes,” said Kalanin.

  “Why don’t the saucers speak to us, Kalinin? Will they let us join their world? Can we join the Higher Circles of galactic citizenship?”

  Kalinin gave a dry laugh. “Higher than the Kremlin.”

  They walked along in silence for a few minutes, bringing their mi
nds into synch. They even got a levitation thing going, loping along in long strides, laughing at each other.

  “You see it too?” said Kalanin, coming to a stop, panting for breath. “You’ll make a painting. Monumental. And then—

  “The end of the world,” said Ida. “Brought to you by a crazy woman who made her crazy boyfriend slit his own throat with a bayonet.”

  “And who brought him back to life. This is holy, Ida. No need to joke.”

  Ida held out her hands. “I laugh because I’m scared.”

  The two of them embraced, lit by the moon and the silver saucers and the first rays of the rising sun. A gentle puff of breeze came off the bay.

  “I’ll paint now,” said Ida.

  “Paint everything,” said Kalanin. “Can it fit?”

  “I’ll use—poetic compression,” replied Ida. “Room to spare.”

  She raised her arms and the skies opened. Tens of thousands of saucer grubs rained down upon her. Some of the grubs became brushes, others formed pools of paint.

  Ida and her living brushes set to work, painting on the street, on the sidewalks, on the nearby warehouse walls, Ida swinging her arm from the shoulder, carving sweeps of color and form. Her loose strokes limned buildings and people and trees. She depicted the insides of the buildings as well as the outsides, and the meanings of the things to be found in there, and the lives of those who’d made the things.

  “Be sure to include an image of your painting,” urged Kalinin.

  Ida nodded, uninterruptedly busy, sharpening the identities of her scribbles and blots. A tight spiral of darkly energetic grubs began converging onto a certain section of her mural. Ida was crafting a secondary world-mural within the main one.

  Just like the main mural, the secondary mural held a image of the entire world. And within it you could see a third mural, with a yet tinier fourth mural inside that, and so on and on.

  “Keep going,” said Kalinin.

  “We’ve only begun,” said Ida. Flecks of paint bedizened her bobbed dark hair like stars in a night sky.

  Kalinin closed his eyes and his lips moved. Rays of light flickered into life, one of them stellating out from Ida’s regress—the others from points across the globe.

  Twelve poles of supernal light, needles of prismatic brilliance, radiating into the cosmos, dissolving the substance of our world. Bathing in its native glow, the Earth became a silver, dodecahedral orb, a mysterious cosmic traveler.

  * * *

  “I like this potlatch,” said Dirt Complaining.

  “The best ever,” Dirt Harkening agreed

  About the Authors

  Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His books include Postsingular and Spaceland. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction writer, born in Brownsville, Texas on April 14, 1954. His first published fiction appeared in the late 1970s, but he came to real prominence in the early 1980s as one of several writers associated with the "cyberpunk" tendency, and as that movement’s chief theoretician and pamphleteer. He also edited the anthology Mirrorshades (1986), which still stands as a definitive document of that period in SF. His novel Islands in the Net (1988) won the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year; he has also won two Hugo awards, for the stories "Bicycle Repairman" (1996) and "Taklamakan" (1998). His 1990 collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, was an important work of early steampunk/neo-Victoriana. His latest novel is The Caryatids (2009). In 1992 he published The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, heralding a second career as a journalist covering social, legal, and artistic matters in the digital world. The first issue of Wired magazine, in 1993, featured his face on its cover; today, their web site hosts his long-running blog, Beyond the Beyond. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling

  Art copyright © 2016 by Richie Pope