City of a Thousand Names

1.0

{Nofy in the Old Country}

Do I know the City of a Thousand Names? Yes, of course I know it, for I was born and raised there. Yet do I know it? Can any woman or man?

My former clan calls their home Anarako Arivo. As a child, it was the only name I knew: it meant Thousand Names in my birth language, Malagasy. Later, during my self-exile to Mars, I learned other communities’ names for the place which had once been my home: Crossroads; Chameleonburg; Alemona; Lunaston; Vertumnia; Hecateville; Oyatown; Eruv Rav; Multitudes; Archipelago; Proteus; Harmonia; Concordia; Fort Babel; Fresh Start; New London; Salad Bowl... and those are a mere handful.

In the language of my birth, there are two words for ‘we.’ There is isika, which is large and inclusive, meaning ‘all of us,’ and izahay, which is small and exclusive, meaning ‘us but not you’. The clan, the tribe, the family, that is izahay. The City, the Country, the Nation, the World, that should be isika. But there was never any isika in Anarako Arivo, nor in Crossroads, nor in Salad Bowl, nor in any of the seventy-thousand other places within the City’s Neuronet, many of which share names, because how many good names are there, after all?

I am forgotten in Anarako Arivo. I know this because I myself was taught to forget those lost to us through Schism, or those who simply left. Remembering the lost only causes pain. In Anarako Arivo, we allow ourselves to remember the dead. We forget those living who disappear, those we can no longer see.

Yet now I, a forgotten one, one who can no longer be seen by those who loved me, must return.

1.1

{Nofy in Bradbury}

“Do you mind if I call you Nofy, rather than Lovaharisoa?”

I smile. It is unusual for a Russian to be so polite; such niceties usually come from an American. Oh, bad thought, go far away! I am thinking like a clanswoman of Anarako Arivo, always separating and sorting people; not like a good citizen of Bradbury. “Nofy is fine. Better than my other short name, Kala Ratsy.”

“Kala Ratsy? It has a nice sound to it. What does it mean?”

“‘Ugly girl’.”

“We’ll stick with Nofy, then.”

I have not previously met Pável Ilyich Davidov. His realm is Trade, whereas mine is Security and Cohesion. We all have our parts to play, each dependent on the others; such is the marvelous tapestry of Bradbury.

“Please know that you do all Bradbury a great service by returning to your former home,” he says. He is not a tall man, particularly not by the standards of my people. His skin is almost the same pale gray color as the walls of the caverns we both call home. “You are a good patriot and comrade. I imagine going back there won’t be easy for you, emotionally or physically; the change in gravity alone—”

I do not want to be belittled, even in an admiring way. “My aid-suit will help with the gravity. It doesn’t concern me.”

“Good. And your old signachip is still in good working order, of course?”

“Of course.”

“Incidentally, your quarry, Ehmet Jian, likely had a hand in designing it. Interesting, isn’t it, that you’ll be hunting a man responsible for a part of you? A part of your past?”

He stares at me expectantly. What is he trying to do? Take my measure? “I’ve read through his dossier,” I say. “He worked for Segregatronics Corporation, seven years as a signachip project head.”

“Those skills he developed at Segregatronics are what make him such an elusive fugitive, at least within the City’s confines. He has become a chameleon. Do you know what that is?”

I can’t help but feel insulted. “My family’s roots are in Madagascar. I am very familiar with chameleons.”

“Of course.” His face tightens slightly. Was my tone too assertive? “You’ll be glad to know Chen Lee gave me a sterling report on you. He has no doubt regarding your ability to do the SchneerSons’ dirty work for them.”

The SchneerSons. When I was a girl, those coordinators of the City’s Neuronet were hardly more substantial in my mind than the witches and sorcerers of Old Madagascar, the shadowy beings my nenibe spoke of in stories meant to frighten me out of my bad behavior. (And what stories those were — witches and sorcerers who would feed crocodiles rice cakes at night to tempt them into marriage, so they could then make the deadly reptiles their slaves!) I did not meet a SchneerSon in the flesh until I made my irrevocable decision to sever ties with my clan.

“These SchneerSons,” I ask, “are they men without spines, unable to deal with their own criminals? Or are they so haughty in their estimation of their trade advantage with us that they feel they can order our people to carry out their most distasteful tasks?”

“It is a jurisdictional matter. Really, Nofy, as a former resident of their City, I thought you would be aware of the limitations they place upon themselves.” His chastisement stings me. “The renegade Ehmet Jian has committed offenses against multiple subcommunities within the City. Had he offended against only one, the SchneerSons would have apprehended him and handed him over to that subcommunity to face justice. But when more than one subcommunity makes claim to a criminal, the SchneerSons, due to their customs, are helpless to take direct action.”

“Helpless? But they are the coordinators—”

“And coordinate is all they are willing to do. They refuse to adjudicate between the claims of various subcommunities.”

“But why—?”

He shrugs mildly. “They are Jews. Not like our Jews here in Bradbury — our Jews are good comrades, for the most part. Intelligent, useful people, as patriotic as any Bradburian.”

I nod. My investigative work has granted me direct familiarity of very few Jews, for which I must give them credit.

“These SchneerSon Jews,” he says, “they are of a different lineage than ours.” He takes a sip of tea, some Russian blend whose scent I don’t recognize. “More insular, more clannish. Apparently they suffer under the burden of a tribal memory of persecution from ancient times, long before the wars, when their kind were accused of secretly controlling the nations of Earth for their own profit. They were blamed, it seems, for virtually every misfortune suffered by all other peoples. Furies were stoked against them, and they were nearly exterminated.

“These SchneerSons remember this. How they came to coordinate the Neuronet which allows the City of a Thousand Names to exist, I do not know. Perhaps the SchneerSons inherited some of their forefathers’ talents for manipulation. But along with those talents came a reluctance — nyet, an aversion to exercising temporal power, or even to be perceived as exercising such power. They facilitate, they persuade, they lubricate relations amongst the tens of thousands of subcommunities which make up the City, acting like oil within the gears of a complex engine. But when an intractable conflict arises between two or more subcommunities? Then they throw up their hands and wail for their outside partners to help them.”

“Which is when I make my entrance, descending in fire from the heavens?”

He smiles. “Oh, I have little doubt they will view you as heaven-sent. The only jurisdictional solution they could come up with regarding this particular renegade, once he’d escaped from their virtual Gehenna prison, was to revoke his City citizenship. Under their law, this reverted him to his prior citizenship. As a Bradburian.”

“And suddenly, he became our problem once more.”

“Yes. Most convenient for them, isn’t it?”

“What if we were to simply refuse to clean up their mess?”

His face darkens. I immediately regret voicing my question. “Not an option. The trade we have with them is too vital. You will regard the furthering of their welfare, and the preservation of their law and customs, as equivalent to defending the well-being of our own dear Bradbury. Are we in complete understanding?”

I nod crisply. “I know my duty, Pável Ilyich. My return to the City of a Thousand Names will bring only credit to Bradbury, and plaudits to you.”

2.0

{Ehmet in Bradbury: Slings and Arrows}

It wasn’t fair.

Nothing about life in Bradbury was fair, not the most plebeian dictum or custom observed by that oppressive regime. Why couldn’t anyone else see that? Thanks to the cosmic radiations my parents absorbed on this misbegotten ball of red dust, I was born with a left arm only two-thirds as long as my right. Bad enough, but at least this disfigurement left me with my senses intact. Was every other Bradburian born without eyes to see, without ears to hear? Without a heart to feel?

Every night, my coworkers at Segregatronics, those with young children to care for, left their workplace at the sixth hour, knowing full well I was not permitted to head home until the ninth. They would murmur their farewells to me, pretending to wish me well; but I knew that, once out of earshot, they smirked to each other, smug in their breeder privilege, scoffing at the childlessness which chained me to my desk for another three long hours.

Once — only once! — did I dare voice my dissatisfaction to one of my coworkers, a hardware specialist named Hasan, a man of Turkish lineage, and so a distant ethnic cousin. “Rules are rules,” he said nonchalantly. He took a sip from his thick coffee and shrugged his shoulders with infuriating casualness. “Bradbury needs to grow if Mars is ever to be made a green world. Growth requires new citizens. Babies and children require parenting. Parenting is work. Those who will not parent must provide offsetting work of some other kind. It is only fair and right. Look, Ehmet, you may not wish to breed, but you can parent, surely. Babies lose birth parents to accidents almost every week. You and your partner could adopt one of those.”

Ignorant fool. He made it sound so simple, in his conceited, brutish way. A breeder himself, he had no insight into my mind, my needs, the pressures I faced on a daily basis. Why couldn’t one be disgusted by procreation and babies and children? Should that be considered criminal?

Privilege! Privilege! Always rubbed in my face! It wasn’t only the breeders. It was also the descendants of the Five Colonies, the five competing Mars outposts which had been forced by circumstance to merge and cooperate in order to survive the decades-long interruption of resupply from Earth. Officially, my family traces its lineage to the Chinese colony. Yet which holiday from the old nation of China do Bradburians celebrate as their own? Chinese New Year, a Han Chinese festival! I am Uyghur. That celebration was not mine. Neither were the Fourth of July, Kenkoku Kinenbi, Orthodox Christmas, or Europe Day. Yet those were the heritage festivals officially sanctioned and glorified by the polity which deigned to claim my loyalty.

The time approached on the calendar for the Uyghur festival of Korban. Tired of the yearly privileging of the five heritage festivals, I went to my personnel directorate to demand that my festival be similarly honored by a cessation of work.

“I presume you have personal leave days accrued?” the man (a blonde Scandinavian) said from behind his desk. “Then I suggest you take one. Your supervisor shouldn’t object. If he does, I’ll speak with him.”

“But it isn’t fair,” I said. “Han Chinese do not need to expend one of their personal leave days to celebrate Chinese New Year. You, as a European, do not need to spend one of your accrued leave days to celebrate Europe Day.”

“Yes, but both of those are heritage festivals. You get off work for Europe Day, the same as I do.”

“But Europe Day means nothing to me. Only Korban does. My holiday should be honored the same way as yours is.”

“Oh, it isn’t my holiday in particular. It’s a holiday for all Bradburians, our way of celebrating the coming together of the Five Colonies. Look, choices had to be made. If we made every dinky religious observance an official holiday, we’d work perhaps five days a year, and we’d starve. Or freeze. Or suffocate. Take your pick.”

“But it isn’t fair.”

“Life in heaven will be fair. Life in Bradbury? We are lucky to have air to breathe, and food to eat. Life here is what you make of it. Take your personal day, good sir, celebrate your Korban, and give thanks for the blessings we all share.”

Puckering asshole of a flea-ridden donkey. May he be caught outside the caves naked of radsuit and air tank!

1.2

{Nofy in Transit}

Achieving the blissful weightlessness of space was much easier this second trip into the void, thanks to the Martian space elevator and the orbiting transit platform from which I departed. How different things were when I fled my home, a petrified yet obstinate seventeen year-old, and catapulted myself towards Mars, already sick and trembling with the neuro-palsy which began afflicting my muscles the moment I stepped outside the reach of Anarako Arivo’s Neuronet. The brutal acceleration required to escape Earth’s gravity seemed it would squash me like a hissing cockroach underfoot. But just when I was sure my guts would be pressed through my throat and my brains shaken out of my head, the fierce acceleration ceased. The journey turned eerily smooth, and I sensed myself float against the restraining straps, as though the bubble of air surrounding me had turned to breathable water.

I assumed it was a one-way trip. The State of Bradbury had paid for my transit, after all, expecting a loyal, permanent resident in return. Yet here I am, plummeting through airless space once more, traversing thousands of kilometers per hour... readying myself to crawl back inside the jealous womb of the City of a Thousand Names.

I spend much of my journey pouring over Ehmet Jian’s dossier, studying it until I have it nearly memorized. Thanks to my work, I know the type all too well. A malcontent, a refusenik. A grievance monger, quick as a scampering lemur to take offense. Such people make little sense to me; particularly not in an environment such as Bradbury’s, where everyone must give his utmost in order for the community to thrive, or even to survive. Why should we agree to take back such a virulent virus of a man? By what right do the SchneerSons demand that we waste any of our scarce resources on Jian at all, even those minimal resources resentfully granted a prisoner?

But then Pável Ilyich Davidov’s stern admonishment returns. The City’s strategic location on the old continent of Australia grants its residents control over vast deposits of uranium and rare earth metals, as well as gold and silver, materials without which our industries would collapse. Someday, we may be fortunate enough to become self-sufficient in the mining of those elements, either at home on Mars or within the asteroid belt, but that day will not arrive soon. Until then, we must continue trading our expertise in technology for their raw materials. And indulge them in their outré requests for aid.

Even though the technicians at Segregatronics have already thoroughly checked out my aid-suit, I hook it into the ship’s network and request an additional diagnostic. The techs upgraded the suit’s motorized musculature to cope with Earth’s greater gravity; I’ll need to recalibrate the settings once I land. In the meantime, I want to reassure myself of the quality of their work. It would do me no good at all to suffer a suit failure while chasing a violent fugitive.

I know my selection for this mission had far less to do with Chen Lee’s praise for my investigative abilities than with Pável Ilyich Davidov’s assessment that the health of a native Bradburian should not be jeopardized by the Neuronet. How long would a newcomer need to be immersed in the Neuronet — having his perceptions altered and edited by thousands of electronic sensors, his muscle responses retarded or sped up by a signachip implanted at the base of his skull — before he would suffer permanent neuromuscular damage upon his departure from the City? With me, the damage is long since done. The Neuronet infiltrated my nervous system for my first seventeen years. Without my aid-suit, I am a cripple, bent by palsy, unable to walk or to operate any instrument less blunt than a broom. But with the aid-suit, I can accomplish feats which would have convinced my Malagasy ancestors of my godhood.

The City can make no aid-suits; its preoccupations with social segregation have left it hundreds of years in the past, technology-wise. Unless, like me, they intend to make the monumental leap to Mars, would-be emigrants dare not leave off suckling the Neuronet’s electronic teat, knowing they would swiftly devolve into helpless cripples. So the population grows ever larger within the City’s eight walls, yet the City, hemmed in by sea and salt marshes, cannot expand... it is like a crab which has outgrown its shell but that cannot switch to another, larger one.

And so they live atop one another, those eight million, only the technomagic of the Neuronet allowing them their life-giving illusions of openness, solitude, and autonomy. Illusions the SchneerSons fear Ehmet Jian seeks to strip from them. And that is why they demand my return.

2.1

{Ehmet in Bradbury: The Final Straw}

When it came to tormenting me, the ableists outdid even the cursed ethnic chauvinists. One miserable day my work colleagues hectored me into attending a Fourth of July observance at Kim Stanley Robinson Park, that faux-idyllic representation of what the surface of Mars will look like two hundred years from now if only we all “put our shoulders to the wheel.” The centerpiece of this day-long exercise in patriotic propaganda was a re-creation of an old American frontier ceremony, the “barn raising.”

My group and I arrived late. Other work groups from other companies had already started the theatrical task of lifting the pretend-barn’s walls to their upright positions so they could be fitted together with primitive pegs. But apparently one of the four teams involved lacked adequate manpower. “Hey!” that team’s leader, a robust specimen of Mediterranean manhood (Greek, perhaps?) shouted to us while looking at me, “could we get a hand over here?”

A hand. Yes, I realized this was an American-style colloquialism for “assistance;” I wasn’t stupid. But what followed stripped the incident of any pretense of innocence. Three of my group, two of which I counted as insensitive louts eager to offend, the third a pathetic would-be ally who in his clumsy attempts to befriend me invariably offended, instantly turned their gazes upon me — staring at my radiation-cursed arm. I then heard a sound. Other, less discerning ears might have interpreted it as a clearing of a throat. But I knew it to be a crowing, despicable chuckle.

An ableist conspiracy to belittle me. To shame me for an accident of birth, for my “failure” to live up to their absurd, atavistic, Greco-Roman ideal of male beauty. Curses upon them all, diseased testicle sacks of syphilitic camels...

Would no one stand with me? Even my own life partner, Ismail, belittled my concerns. How could he not see those constant assaults on my person, feel their cruel reverberations in the very marrow of his bones? Were we not birds of the same plumage? Proud Uyghurs? Men who loved other men? But I came to realize with increasing sorrow that he had been infected by the prevailing malevolence. Like a slave raised to worship the god worshiped by his owner, he had bought into his own diminution.

“Ehmet, I love you more than Earth’s forests love the sun, but I wish you would not always pick at the scabs of these psychic wounds. Let your spirit grow quiet. Let the warmth of my love calm you, dear one. Do not the Old Scriptures say the wicked are like the troubled sea, whose waters cast up mire and dirt?”

I pulled away from his tentative embrace. “Are you calling me wicked, Ismail? You?”

“No, no, that is not my meaning! Always, you hear the worst! No, what I mean is, if you will not seek to calm the unquiet waters of your spirit, if this anger festers and festers, you may be tempted into wickedness. That is what I fear, Ehmet. I am afraid for you. I am afraid for us.”

And so he nattered on, like an old woman fretting over the fraying of her prayer rug, not realizing the ceaseless nervous fidgeting of her fingers was the cause of its fraying. I should not have been surprised, several months after, by the gross betrayal with which he impaled me, the rust-pitted sword he monstrously shoved through my liver. Yet I was. To my eternal discredit, I was taken unawares, like a babe yet unweaned.

“Ehmet, would you accompany me to the park this evening?”

Such a seemingly innocent request. Yet so was Hawwa’s invitation to her husband Adam to bite from the apple; that, too, took place within a garden, or park. And so, like the all-too-trusting first man, I allowed myself to be led down the garden path.

“Ehmet, I have something of great importance to tell you.”

Standing beneath the blue false sky of Kim Stanley Robinson Park, I detected a hint of evil in his words and demeanor. I mustered my fortitude in readiness. Yet little did I know I was like a man who believed himself called to soak up a water spill with a towel, when actually the dam holding back the reservoir had broken!

“Ehmet, dear one, I have decided to take a wife.”

I could not have been more stunned had a meteor plunged through the false blue roof and landed before my feet. “A... a wife?” I said, dumbly. “You mean... a woman is my rival? A woman?”

“Not your rival, Ehmet — your complement. You have known from our very first meeting that my desires include both men and women. The pressure upon me from my parents to father a child has grown unbearable. I’ve alluded to you of this, but I’ve never fully admitted how it has torn at me—”

“And so you betray me...”

“Betray you? Never! I would sooner cut off my own right hand! Ehmet, never would I have made a marriage proposal to this woman had she not agreed that you and I would remain lovers, with her full approval. I do not love her in the way I love you. This arrangement is merely to satisfy my parents, and to relieve me of a crushing moral burden of conscience. Yet there are ancillary benefits, as well — when Nurbiya becomes pregnant, all three of us can register as the child’s parents. You and I would both be permitted to reduce our work hours in the office. We will actually be able to spend more time together, albeit with the child—”

After cleaving me in two, he offered pale blandishments? “Don’t do me any favors, Ismail,” I said in the coldest tone I could muster. “Take your wife. Blessings upon you both. I hope you will be very happy with your future child. As for you and me, we are done.”

His eyes welled up with tears. His voice quavered. “Please, Ehmet, do not be like this—”

He reached for me like a shambling thing, desperate to pull me into his clammy embrace. I pulled off my shoe and swatted him with it, as I would a crawling vermin. “Scum! You are dead to me! Dead! Were you the last bucketful of piss on Mars, you would not be worthy of being recycled!”

He ran away, crying like an imbecilic wretch.

Oh, false paradise! Oh, subterranean palace of whores and jackals! I stared about me at the trees and grass, fed by an artificial star, by liars’ sunlight. The falseness choked me. The hypocrisy and malignity of this arrogant outpost on a dead world finally became too much for me to bear.

I would go where the jibes of my inferiors would no longer sting my ears.

Where I could enjoy the company of my own kind, and my own kind only.

I would go to the City of a Thousand Names.

1.3

{Nofy at the City Wall}

The wall. The oh-so-comforting wall about the City. I remember my parents speaking of it as if it were an old friend, a trusted family advisor, a guardian upon whom we could always rely. “The wall will always be there to protect us,” they said. I later came to understand that it is merely a tangible, universally visible symbol of the far more important invisible walls separating the seventy-thousand subcommunities — or is it eighty-thousand now? One day, I firmly believe, there will be as many subcommunities as there are residents in the City.

I focus on the wall; better this than obsessing over the less pleasant aspects of my return to Earth. Although I have never seen one in the flesh, I believe I now have insight into how a hippopotamus must feel when the buoying waters of its bog dry up, and it is forced to ponderously plod through the mud. My aid-suit is learning the gravity of this place, its mechanical musculature gradually adjusting and compensating, but it is not a quick enough student to suit me (ha, ha). Matters will improve greatly once I am plugged back into the Neuronet, once impulses from my brain can follow the old mappings throughout my body.

Then there is the heat. My aid-suit informs me the ambient temperature is ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit, thirty-four point four degrees Celsius, with relative humidity at eighty-three percent. I am sweating. Sweating like a pig dressed in polyester, I believe is the local idiom. I cannot recall sweating even a droplet on Mars. Our subterranean shelters maintain a constant temperature of fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, with artificial humidity set at twenty percent. I can remember becoming quite slick with sweat as a girl, playing in the City’s seemingly empty plazas and squares beneath the blazing sun.

I pass an encampment of the City’s Self-Defense Force, that legion of guardians loyal to the City but not allowed to taste of it. I wave to the platoons of men and women maintaining their thankless vigil between the sea and the wall, the outside world and the wall. They eye me warily, hoping, perhaps, that I will act in a hostile fashion so that they will finally, after years of boring quietude, have an opportunity to fire their weapons in anger, to defend the gates they are not allowed to enter. Lacking signachips, they perceive all, but are invisible to those they protect.

I join the queue of people waiting to reenter the Brisbane Gate, returning to the City from their work in the Mount Kinnobock mine to the west. As a squad of guardians stands by, ready to detain anyone deemed to lack the right to enter, persons in the queue pause beneath a scanner, then wait for the automatic door to roll open for them. I was told preparations had been made for me, that my signachip had been remotely registered so that the City would not, like Jonah’s whale, vomit me out. Even so, standing beneath the scanner and waiting for the door’s determination summons a pall of dread, a cringe-worthy memory. The morning I thought I would be leaving the City forever, when I passed through Orsinney Gate, also known as the Exile’s Gate, the sound of the door rolling shut behind me, cutting me off from the only people and home I’d ever known, so terrified me that my bladder let go, dampening the sand between my feet.

But the door opens for me. I am no longer sixteen years old, a panicked child-woman. I have been entrusted by my country with a vital mission, and I will see it through to its end.

I step through the gate, and then I am inside the City. Inside! What a teeming mass of people! What a cacophony of voices and clamor and shuffling feet! I steel myself for rough jostling, but not one of the dozens of persons streaming on all sides of me touches me. Oh, their carry-sacks or parcels, if not held close to their bodies, might lightly brush against my aid-suit, but their flesh never once touches mine.

How will I find my contact in this endless, sprawling river of people? Then I remind myself that is her role to find me. She’ll most likely have exercised her option to screen out each and every one of the hundreds of pedestrians who crowd this thoroughfare. In her Neuronet-filtered vision, I likely stand out like a tall ship on an empty sea.

And so it comes to pass. A soft hand touches the bare skin of my arm, and I turn to find my escort. Showing no concern for the afternoon heat, she wears a long, black dress which extends from the tops of her severe shoes to the upper reaches of her throat, with full-length sleeves which reveal only the pale skin of her fingers. Her hair is completely concealed by a black headscarf. Her pinkish face, flushed from the heat, is unadorned by any makeup or jewelry.

“Welcome to Eruv Rav, Miss Rabemananjara,” she says, extending her hand for me to shake. “I am Leah Abramovitz. I’ll be your guide and assistant during your stay in the City.”

She pronounces my surname with reasonable accuracy, stressing, however, the wrong syllable, which is certainly forgivable, given my name’s length. “Please, Leah, call me Nofy. Thank you for meeting me. How far must we travel to the place where I’ll be debriefed?”

“We must go to Queen Elizabeth Square, at the City’s center. Are you greatly fatigued from your journey? There are places we can stop along the way, if you wish.”

“No... it’s just... the combination of the greater gravity and the press of all these people. It’s somewhat overwhelming...”

She looks about her as though she is puzzled; then she remembers. “Oh, forgive me, Nofy — you’re like those soldiers outside the walls, aren’t you? No filters applied at all? No cocooning eruvnet? You’re seeing and hearing... everyone, aren’t you?”

“Yes... I never experienced this in the seventeen years I lived here. On Mars, in Bradbury... well, our leaders would sing hoseas if we could achieve even a tenth of this population density. If our resources would allow for it.”

“As soon as we reach headquarters, I’ll use my equipment to align your personal signachip with our eruvnet. I should have thought to bring my portable tuning unit with me, forgive me...” She shoots me a queerly searching glance, the look of someone soliciting a greater intimacy, quite odd for someone who has just met me. “Tell me, though — what is it like, to feel yourself surrounded by so many people of so many different sorts? Is it dreadful? Terrifying? Or is it... exhilarating? All the sounds, the smells?”

When I was a daydreaming child, I once toyed with such thoughts. “Simply something to adjust to,” I say. “At this juncture, far too overstimulating, but I am too weary to make aesthetic judgements of any worth. Ask me again once I’ve enjoyed a bath and a good night’s rest.”

“Once we’ve reached Koolan Square, we’ll be able to board the Cloncurry Avenue streetcar. Then it will take between an hour and ninety minutes for us to reach Queen Elizabeth Square, where headquarters is. Will you be all right until then?”

So relief will be within reach once I can look up and see the Gladstone Clock Tower, the City’s tallest structure and its geographic heart. As a girl, I never needed a wristwatch of my own, not with its eight separate giant time pieces, each facing one of the City’s eight walls, perpetually overshadowing my young, impatient self. “I’ll be fine. The longer I’m here, the easier it all will be for me.”

I follow her north along the road which parallels the octagonal walls which surround the City. Uncomfortable though my present circumstances make me, I remind myself I am living an old fantasy. I am fulfilling my girlhood wish that I should see, smell, and hear the totality of the City’s populace, not merely the relatively few members of my own clan and those select allied subcommunities my elders had decided it was permissible for us to perceive. Leah swims unerringly and confidently through this sea of humanity, pausing, turning, sidestepping, subconsciously dodging collisions with persons she does not see. Her walk is slowed by the continual necessity of these corrections, but her body accomplishes them with aplomb.

Not being plugged into the Neuronet, I do not benefit from its personal radar field. And yet, indirectly, I do. As an experiment, I stride directly toward a man whose vision is blocked by a stack of parcels he carries in his arms. At the last possible second prior to our collision, he pauses, then shifts slightly to his left, barely avoiding grazing me. Were I extremely persistent, I might succeed in tripping him up with a sweep of my leg. And he would most likely react the same way a pedestrian within the catacombs of Bradbury would after stumbling over an uneven patch of the cave floor... curse himself for his presumed clumsiness, pick himself up from the ground, and then gather his scattered parcels and continue on his way.

I stare into the faces of the crowds surrounding me. They do not stare back into mine. They look through me, as though I were made of wind. I doubt that any of them perceives more than a twentieth of the pedestrians walking about them. Now and then, I see a look of recognition blossom on a face, and a man or woman will smile and glance across the road and shout a greeting to a person on the far side, someone who, anywhere else but the City, would be blocked from their sight by several dozen passing bodies. And that distant person, who should also not be able to see their interlocutor, waves and returns the greeting. The Neuronet does not repeal the laws of physics or the behavior of light, I remind myself. It cannot render those bodies filtered out from an individual’s eruvnet transparent. However, the Neuronet itself “sees” everything, using the physical eyes of the millions of persons attached to itself as its own cameras. And so it is capable, through feats of computation fully comprehendible, perhaps, only to the mind of God, of projecting into the visual receptors of each brain hooked to a signachip a simulation of what would be seen if all the persons and objects filtered out by that person’s eruvnet truly did not exist.

We draw close to what, to my ears, sounds like an appalling cacophony, an aural riot of clashing melodies and rhythms. How could such ear-splitting offensiveness be permitted? I’m tempted to hurl cobblestones at the headache-inducing tuba player and the various trumpeters, electric keyboardists, guitarists, and amplified zither players, and especially the dispersed platoon of drummers, each pounding their drums to a different beat. The musicians sit in various clumps surrounding nearly a hundred persons beneath the umbrellas of a streetside café. The patrons, mostly mine workers indulging in after-shift beers or short, stout mugs of mud-thick coffee, seem to be enjoying this “music”. But how could anyone tolerate such baleful noise, much less “enjoy” it...?

Then I realize that they’re all listening to different musics. Of course! Idiot Nofy! The sign above the café, I notice, is to me an electronic blur, which probably means this establishment goes by many names, each encoded to be perceptible only to certain subcommunities. I imagine the members of each group only see and interact with their “own” wait staff, order from their “own” menus, selecting only beverages which their subcommunity has preapproved. Muslims are not permitted to drink alcohol? It does not appear on their menu. Mormons may not consume coffee? For them, it is never brewed. And each group listens to its “own” music, too.

I tap my companion’s shoulder. “Leah, do you hear any music?”

She turns back to me and smiles. “Why, of course! The klezmer band here is quite good, don’t you think? There’s nothing to compare with the plaintive wail of that clarinet, is there? Do you enjoy klezmer music? We could stop and listen, if you like, so long as we sit at our own table, apart from the men.”

I notice in the far corner of the café, closest to what I assume is the klezmer band, a group of men in black coats and black-furred hats sit around a table, sharing a bottle of strong drink. All but the youngest of them sport long beards. Men of Leah’s clan, the SchneerSons?

There’s another man sitting with the SchneerSons, also bearded, but not dressed like them. He is darker than they are, possibly Turkic, but with eyes that seem almost Mongolian...

Eyes that are looking directly at me. Not through me. At me.

No one in this café but Leah should be able to see me. Only she has adjusted her signachip’s filters to be able to perceive a person who is not plugged into the Neuronet...

My blood turns cold. That man who accosts me with his level stare — a stare which coldly and arrogantly appraises me — can only be the renegade, Ehmet Jian.

As though he has read my mind, he rises from the table, disturbing none of his companions, for they are not his companions — he is as invisible to them as a deadly virus. Still meeting my gaze, he brandishes a knife, twirling it deftly between his fingers like a circus performer about to hurl the weapon at a bound and blindfolded assistant. Then he strides to the quartet of musicians playing klezmer music. Sensing what he is about to do, I struggle closer, but I am hindered by the press of bodies and tables.

Standing next to the violin player, he mocks the man (and me) by imitating him, miming the playing of a violin, using his knife as he would a bow. The musician finishes his solo and lowers his violin from his cheek. With a swift jerk, the renegade slits his exposed throat.

I command my aid-suit to charge Jian. But my palsied muscles, excited by my surge of adrenaline, over-exert themselves against the unfamiliar weight of Earth’s gravity, and the suit responds by over-amplifying my motions. Damn it all! I lurch from side to side, overcompensating, my strides disastrously uncoordinated. Balance gone, I crash into a table of miners who cannot see or feel me, upending their drinks and refreshments.

Portions of the café descend into chaos — that section occupied by the SchneerSons, who have witnessed the musician’s mysterious bloodying, and the tables I have just crashed through. But all other sections remain eerily undisturbed. I scramble on hands and knees toward the downed musician, my limbs flailing like an infant’s, praying the renegade will also stumble.

But by the time I regain my footing — curse my impediments! — Jian has disappeared within the dense crowds. Hordes of persons, blessed by technologically imposed ignorance, who will never be aware that they blithely walked within five meters of an attempted murder.

2.2

{Ehmet in Eruv Rav}

“Mr. Jian, let me repeat that we of Eruv Rav, indeed, all of us who live here within the City of a Thousand Names, certainly welcome immigrants — newcomers from any tribe, sect, or ethnic grouping known to mankind. We make room for all, within reason. But you must understand: although not irrevocable, a decision to join us and enter the Neuronet, to take on the yoke of a signachip, is a momentous one, with lasting consequences. Not to be entered into lightly.”

I stared at my interlocutor and his fellows, hiding my distaste with great difficulty. Jews. My ancestral enemies. The eternal foes of the Prophet (not that I am a believer, but still, such was the guiding faith of my father’s fathers). Did I truly wish to subject myself to a polity ruled by such as these? These sinister schemers with their large, hooked noses, their absurd side curls and fur hats, their grasping love of money, their garlicky skin the color of earthworms?

They swore they do not rule this City. They swore they exercised no power, that they were merely faithful servants of the City’s inhabitants, coordinators amongst the City’s seventy thousand subcommunities, humble drones who ensured that all essential work to keep the City functional was apportioned fairly.

Truth? Or clever Jew propaganda? Did it matter to me, ultimately? I knew how the Neuronet works. I had assisted in maintaining it from distant Mars for the past sixteen years. The SchneerSons told me that once I was granted my permanent signachip, had selected my eruvnet, and had been accepted by that eruvnet’s subcommunity, the invisible walls of my chosen eruvnet would descend about me, and the SchneerSons, along with the great majority of the shuffling hordes who inhabit this City, would vanish from my reality. I knew the technology behind all this, knew it as well as my fingers knew my razor and the contours of my face.

“I do not make this decision lightly,” I said. “I make no decisions lightly. I am a serious man.”

“Yes. I can tell.” Did the Jew mock me? I felt blood rush to my face, but I kept my anger in check. He is merely a gatekeeper, I repeated to myself. A petty bureaucrat whose forms I must check and sign before I can achieve my goal: a space free from disrespect, jibes, taunts, whispered innuendoes, and infuriating arrogance. “Still,” he continued, “I would be remiss in my responsibility to you if I did not emphasize the neurological consequences of joining us here. Entering the Neuronet will in short time effect changes within your brain. Your nervous system will quickly grow accustomed to interacting with your signachip and accepting the altered, filtered stimuli it feeds to your brain’s sensory receptors. New pathways will form. You will be altered, permanently. Should you ever opt to leave the City — and I will not lie to you, some do — you will live out the remainder of your life as a cripple, the extent of your disability roughly correlated to the length of time you have spent linked to the Neuronet—”

“I know all this.” Was he not familiar with my background? “Your Neuronet is no mystery to me — I know it better than you do, better than any man in this room. I have personally worked on the aid-suits provided to help emigrants from the City adjust to their disability. This is all elementary to me.”

“Good, good. Then you are better informed than the vast majority of persons who have sat where you now sit. HaShem willing, you will never have reason to depart and contend with disability. The crucial task for you, for your happiness with us, is selecting the subcommunity best suited for you, and for which you are best suited. You may take as long as you wish perusing our catalog. We counsel judicious contemplation. We understand that those who seek to join us are often driven to do so by persecution, either overt or perceived. They are eager, sometimes desperate to escape the larger society from which they come, to retreat to a safe space of their own choosing. Seeking affirmation and reassurance, as well as safety, their initial impulse is to choose the coziest possible home, a highly particularized and limited eruvnet of persons they believe will be exactly like them. This is in no way a bad or improper impulse. Indeed, it is an impulse we SchneerSons are commanded by HaShem to honor and support — the avoidance of shatnez, that forbidden combination of things which are meant to be kept separate.

“But I wish you to be aware, Mr. Jian, there is a downside to selecting a severely delimited eruvnet. You may inadvertently cut yourself off from potential friends, lovers, or spouses, whichever apply in your case. We have found it is better to be more inclusive at first when making your selection than it is to be exceedingly discriminate. Let me give an example. If you are a yellow isosceles triangle with green stripes, we recommend you start out by joining an eruvnet which encompasses all triangles or all yellow shapes, rather than limiting yourself to yellow triangles, or yellow shapes with green stripes, or, worse yet, yellow isosceles triangles with green stripes.

“Please understand, Schisms occur within subcommunities frequently and with relative ease. Mergings of subcommunities, on the other hand, are more like comet sightings... very rare indeed. And do not think that, should you start with a severely delimited subcommunity — some of our subcommunities have memberships as small as a dozen, the smallest having only four — and then grow dissatisfied with your lack of choice of companions, it will be an easy matter for you to petition to shift to a larger, more inclusive community. The more populous and variegated subcommunities often view candidates for admission who come from relatively atomized subcommunities as potential malcontents — Schism risks — and reject them out of hand. I have seen unfortunate souls who have realized they made a mistake by going too ‘small’ leave their original subcommunity, but then face rejection after rejection. Some of these unfortunates never find a new subcommunity. They end up as isolates. Tragedies, really. We SchneerSons do what we can to care for them and encourage better-off citizens to tithe for their welfare. But in our view, isolates face a self-made hell only half a step up from Gehenna, the criminals’ underworld.”

How he rambled on! I wished I could switch him off like a light. “Thank you for your concern for my happiness,” I said, not without sarcasm. “But I am fully capable of taking all relevant factors into account when making my selection. More capable than most.”

“Of course. Of course. Our catalog awaits you, Mr. Jian, for as long as you wish to peruse it. Please let me know if I or any of my associates can assist you in any way.”

1.4

{Nofy in Eruv Rav}

“Mr. Emmanuel, he was aware of me. Ehmet Jian knew I’d arrived in the City. He knew which gate I’d entered through. He slit that violist’s throat to jeer at me, mocking my ability to catch him.”

Leah’s supervisor, Baruch Emmanuel, makes a tent of his fat fingers just beneath the pout of his protruding lips. “This is quite bad,” he says. “He has acquired more capability than we had feared. At least the musician was not killed, thank HaShem.”

“Killing him wasn’t Jian’s intent!” I say with more heat than I’d intended. “He didn’t need to kill the man in order to taunt me. If only I’d had more chance to acclimate to Earth’s gravity, he would not have humiliated me the way he did...”

“It sounds as though you may be taking this encounter too personally. You may wish to take a step back. Oftentimes the hawk, stalking his prey coldly and analytically from above, proves a more effective hunter than the impassioned wolf, lunging across the snow.”

Platitudes! Only the disconcerting sight of nearly a dozen non-SchneerSons milling about within this supposedly private conference room prevents me from continuing to vent my anger. “Are we truly speaking in confidence here?” I cast a somewhat disbelieving glance at the turbaned individuals who drink tea and scan glowing screens at various chairs around the long table, who occasionally look straight through me and my host. “Given your role and responsibilities, is it unreasonable of me to have expected you would have private office space?”

My host offers me a pinched smile. “Those others you see? They cannot see or hear us. As you may have noticed on your journey here, space within the City is at a premium. We are hemmed in by salt marshes and bays, and our sandy soil will not support buildings any higher than seven stories tall, apart from our clock tower. Our Neuronet allows us all to experience our work and private lives in this exceedingly crowded environment as though each clan has room to spare, vast private domains disturbed only by bird calls and the gentle sounds of blowing leaves. Was that not your experience, growing up here?”

I am in no mood for pleasantries. But I remind myself that here I must act not only as a law enforcement officer, but also a diplomat. “Yes, it was. But the tales I heard of you SchneerSons as a child, that you were persons of enormous, almost frightening power and responsibility, virtual demigods... I imagined you would reserve the grandest buildings at the center of Queen Elizabeth Square for yourselves.”

“And now you know such is not the case, nor has it ever been. We SchneerSons claim no special privileges for ourselves. Our office space is just as crowded as any other within the City, at least to the unfiltered senses of those outside our Neuronet.”

Leah reenters the conference room carrying a palm-sized computer strapped to her wrist. She sits next to me. “I’ll have you plugged into our eruvnet in just a moment, Nofy. I am so sorry I did not have my portable unit with me when we first met. If I had, perhaps you could have stopped that awful man...”

“Is there anything I need to do?”

“So long as your signachip is in good working order, my unit will synch with it, no action required on your part. Then I can easily apply my own filters to you.”

And so it occurs. She taps a few keys on her portable device. My vision momentarily blurs, my ears begin ringing, I smell the cloying sweetness of ripening mangoes, overwhelming, and my stomach twists. Then, as if my head had been enclosed in a bubble filled with noxious gases, the bubble pops and the sensory distortions disappear. I look around me. The turbaned individuals and their cups of coffee and office equipment have vanished. Baruch, Leah, and I are alone. And I feel... right. Everything I see, the faces of my hosts, the paintings on the walls, the furniture, it all looks sharper, more vivid than it did just seconds ago. The transition almost makes me believe I have spent the last fourteen years with a strip of silken gauze wrapped about my face, muffling my senses. And now the gauze has been suddenly cut away.

My hosts watch me intently. “Welcome back to the Neuronet,” Baruch says. “How do you feel?”

How do I feel? Regretful that I ever left this place, and mortified that I should find myself feeling remorse. “Good,” I say, “very good,” guilt-ridden at admitting this. Am I being disloyal to my adopted country? Bradbury suddenly seems very far away, a cold, unreal dream. “The transition... it’s easier than I would’ve hoped. Before I head out after Ehmet Jian, I’ll want to perform some tests on myself — coordination, reflexes, strength. My aid-suit will need to adjust to the ‘new me,’ as well, so there won’t be any repeat of today’s debacle near the Brisbane Gate. I assume Leah’s portable unit is just as capable of tracking Jian’s movements as your computers here in your operations center...?”

My newly boosted confidence fades as I notice the consternation on Baruch’s face. “Actually, Nofy, the situation has... changed, during the time you were in transit from Mars. To our detriment, unfortunately. We are no longer capable of consistently tracking him.”

What? This isn’t what I was told to expect — “What happened?”

“We aren’t sure. Please recall, on your world, he was a skilled technician at the company which maintains and upgrades our Neuronet. He may have become aware of our electronic surveillance, then performed some alteration on either his signachip’s settings or whatever tuning device he has managed to cobble together, foiling that surveillance.”

“So he is now completely invisible to you? To me?”

“Mostly, yes. But not completely. He still appears suddenly and briefly on our tracking screens whenever he shifts from one eruvnet to another. At those times, for a few seconds we are blessed with a fix on his physical location and which eruvnet he has selected to flee into. But then he is lost to our detection, until the next time he chooses to shift.”

What does this mean? That I will rush from locale to locale across the City’s two hundred and twenty-two square kilometers each time a blip of Ehmet Jian appears on Leah’s screen, then search for him within whatever subcommunity he has chosen to hide in? And how am I supposed to know who he is? “Baruch, given that he has his own tuning unit, won’t he likely use it to disguise his appearance? Won’t he blend in with whichever group whose eruvnet he is trespassing upon?”

“That is an assumption we must make.”

“Then you must put out an all-points bulletin. Alert every resident of the City that they must immediately report the appearance of any person unknown to them, especially anyone who is acting in a peculiar or aggressive fashion.”

Frowning, he shakes his head. “No, that would foment panic.”

“This man is a killer. Isn’t some degree of panic justified?”

“We must not act in too heavy-handed a fashion. If we SchneerSons are perceived to be functioning in an authoritarian way, dictating to the leaderships of each subcommunity, the strains on the City’s social fabric could prove devastating. In the wake of the sectarian wars, thousands of starving refugees washed up upon the City’s shores each week from all corners of the strife-torn globe. Given the very real danger of sectarian hatreds taking fresh root here, the establishment of our Neuronet and its subsidiary eruvnets was a moral imperative. Sustaining the integrity of that Neuronet remains a moral imperative. As the accepted coordinators of the Neuronet, we must be seen as impartial. The sovereignty of each individual eruvnet is an inviolable, sacred principle—”

“Are you afraid? Afraid the people might turn on you?” The naked self-interest and self-preservation I detect disgusts me. “Ehmet Jian is a clear and present danger. He has murdered two people and nearly murdered a third. If I cannot call upon the assistance of the eyes and ears of your eight million residents, segregated within seventy thousand subcommunities, then achievement of my task grows as infinitely improbable as my finding a single grain of rice buried amidst the sands of your beaches.”

His pale face flushes with blood; its crimson aspect, marked with large pores, reminds me of the cratered plains of my adopted planet. “I do not relish your tone, Bradburian. I hope your superiors made it amply clear to you that you are working for us, not the other way around. You will do what you have been sent here to do, and you will do so fully within the parameters we establish. If you cannot agree to this, then you will be sent home immediately, and the ensuing delay in Bradbury’s capture of their criminal — Ehmet Jian is Bradbury’s responsibility now, no longer ours — will be taken fully into account during the next round of trade negotiations.”

Ahhh... my pressing this issue any further will only result in my being sent back to Mars in disgrace. “I will follow your rules,” I say, carefully sucking the venom from my words. “I apologize for having offended you. Crimes such as Jian’s arouse my passions. I spoke out of turn.”

“Your apology is both appreciated and accepted.”

“What restrictions must I comply with when interacting with citizens?”

“As best you can, limit your questioning to the subcommunity leaderships, or persons who have been directly impacted by Jian’s intrusions. Leah will make introductions for you. The fewer citizens you must interact with, the better. As you may well imagine, our citizenry are exceedingly sensitive to the presence of foreigners. You will alter your perceived appearance so as to blend in and cause the minimal disruption possible. Should HaShem smile upon your efforts, apprehending Jian will require you to shift through only a handful of eruvnets. I assume you’ve been made aware of the City’s total ban on firearms and other projectile weapons?”

“It was explained to me.”

“Good. Only our soldiers are permitted to handle guns, and even they are not allowed to use them inside the City’s walls, for reasons which are obvious.”

“Is there any chance Jian has acquired a gun?”

“Very little. Unless he has snuck outside the walls and stolen a weapon from one of the soldiers’ camps.”

The likelihood that he has done precisely that cannot be ruled out, given the other capabilities he has shown. I did not bring either of my service pistols with me. But, knowing I would be contending with a foe who could choose to be undetectable to me, I had my aid-suit outfitted with automatic tasers, stunners programmed to respond to any aggressive actions or movements made within my immediate vicinity. Unlike my own five senses, my aid-suit’s sensors will have no inputs filtered out.

The tasers could be classified as projectile weapons, certainly. But they are far less likely than a fired bullet to harm an innocent bystander. And given Baruch’s apparent unconcern for my personal safety, my sense of guilt at not mentioning them to him is less than nil.

“Are there any other instructions you wish to share with me?” I ask.

“Not at this time. Any additional communications will be routed through Leah.”

Ushering me out of the conference room, he does not offer to shake my hand. And that is one cultural prohibition I do not mind at all, certainly not in this case.

2.3

{Ehmet in Salama}

Salama. In Arabic, it means safety. A fitting name for a sanctuary for male lovers of men, whose ancestors had lived and died in nations subjugated by the colonial powers — those same five overweening, arrogant powers which later planted their belligerent flags in the Martian dust. I truly believed this Salama would be an appropriate sanctuary for me, a refuge from not only the heterosexualist supremacists, male and female, but also the hateful Han Chinese, smug Russians, cursed Europeans, Satanic Americans, and ethnocentric Japanese.

And at first, it was indeed a paradise of sorts. The work was easy, at least for me. We residents of Salama had agreed to accept responsibility for the upkeep of portions of the City’s sewerage and water infrastructure. The software which controlled the pumps, filters, and chemical treatments was archaic compared with the code I had mastered while working at Segregatronics, but at its root proved robust and logical and not difficult to master. Indeed, for a time, at least, it felt refreshing and novel to work with such crude, elemental tools. And not only the work felt liberating. The City was exhilaratingly empty and open to us, we sixty-five thousand residents of Salama. Its public baths were reserved for our pleasures, its theaters awaited our concerts and plays, its cafés served our preferred foods, and its libraries stocked with only those books in accordance with our mores. The streets were ours to roam without fear of ridicule or assault. Best of all, or so it seemed to me, was my dazzling new reality of untrammeled erotic choice — the intoxicating notion that any person, anywhere, whose looks caused my gaze to linger could potentially become my lover.

And yet, it was not long before I came to learn, most painfully, that Salama, too, had its hierarchy. A hierarchy every bit as implacably cruel and unjust as any of the hierarchies which had reigned in Bradbury. A hierarchy of beauty. Of looksism.

The first performance I attended at Saladin Square’s al-Farahidi Theater was an opera based upon One Thousand and One Nights. I found the actor who portrayed Shahryar, the king, to be exquisite: the voice of an angel combined with a symmetry of form and fairness of features which could only have been the work of that greatest of all sculptors, Allah Himself. During the intermission, aflame with infatuation, I turned to my coworker Faddey and informed him that the singer Nasir el-Amin, he of the silken voice and golden body, would be my next conquest.

Faddey, notorious for his pessimism, laughed ruefully. “Do not be so certain of that, Ehmet,” he said. “Nasir the Singer is known to have many dozens of lovers, nearly all of whom are as fair looking as he himself, although few begin to approach him in talent. If I were you, my friend, I would not subject myself to the humiliation I would likely face when offering myself to that man. Ah, but Salama is as rich in receptive puckered roses as ancient Alexandria was in scholarly scrolls. Worthy one, aim your arrows at a less lofty target, and happiness will be yours for the asking.”

His casual dismissal of my chances merely served to make the challenge of it all the more urgent and intoxicating. “You say I am not worthy of Nasir the Singer?”

“I did not say that, my dear friend. But I can assure you, Nasir the Singer will.”

“How can you be so sure of that? I have been a resident of Salama for only four months, but already I am lauded as the most skilled programmer at the water center. I emigrated from Mars — unlike the parochial men who make up Nasir’s circle, not only have I experienced life outside the City, I have known life on another planet. I have seen the twin moons of Mars embrace Earth between them in the night sky. I have seen showers of flaming meteors strike the Martian desert and kick up miles-high plumes of red dust. I have seen this blue and green planet from the vantage point of an angel. I may not be capable of singing arias as Nasir can, but I can ‘sing’ of these wondrous things I have witnessed, sights and experiences far beyond the ken of his provincial lovers.”

“Ah, my friend, what you say would be well and good if Nasir valued minds nearly as much as he treasures bodies. But alas...” He shrugged as he glanced at my wilted arm. The burning humiliation of his silent rebuke infuriated me.

“I will show you, you bastard of a lame camel,” I said. “Do you care to make a wager on my success? I bet you one week’s salary that within a fortnight of tonight’s performance, either Nasir el-Amin will have shared my bed, or I his.”

Phlegmatic in temperament, Faddey did not respond to my sudden fury with heat of his own. He merely smiled once again, this time a bit sadly. “Ah, impetuous youth, I do not confiscate the money of the deluded; I leave that distasteful chore to the tax collectors. I wish you only good fortune, my friend.”

As soon as Nasir had accepted the audience’s final accolades, I left Faddey and marched myself to the star’s dressing room. Its entrance was guarded by a pair of glowering monoliths formed entirely of muscle and sinew. I suspected that, like the dinosaurs of old, they sported auxiliary brains in their hips to transmit neural impulses to their legs, for the brains in their skulls were too feeble to create pulses hardy enough to travel that immense distance.

“I wish to see Nasir el-Amin,” I told the first monolith.

His huge square head swiveled toward me ponderously. “Who are you, and why should he wish to see you?”

“Tell him I am Ehmet Jian, the master programmer from Mars.”

“So you’re a disc jockey?” the second monolith said (surprising me with his ability to vocalize words). “If you’re a record spinner, give us a couple dozen free passes to this Mars place, and Nasir will consider whether he’ll allow his entourage to give your disco a try.”

“Idiot!” I said, appalled that any organism with the gall to call itself human could be so ignorant. “I would not expect one of your exceedingly limited intellect to comprehend this, but I am from the planet Mars, and I have nothing to do with selecting songs in dance halls—”

I did not have the chance to finish explaining myself, for the first monolith picked me up by the beltline of my pants, carried me to the theater’s back entrance, and pitched me down four steps into the dank alleyway.

Well, I suffered severe bruising, as well as a painful misalignment of my neck that made it impossible for me to read code on a screen for more than a few minutes at a time. I wrote Nasir the Singer a sternly worded letter informing him that I planned to press both criminal and civil charges against his employees, but that I would beneficently agree to drop all legal actions if he would deign to have dinner with me. I received a return letter from Nasir’s lawyer stating that he would be most pleased to meet my advocate in court, as a video security camera had captured the entirety of my interaction with the bodyguards and proved my belligerence beyond legal doubt.

Further attempts to arrange an introductory meeting between myself and Nasir the Singer proved fruitless. The best I was able to achieve was receipt in the mail of a signed photograph (the signature, seemingly authentic at first glance, proved to be the soulless imprint of a machine).

Firm in my conviction that I should not fail, that I would not fail, I determined to learn how others had achieved the feat of becoming one of Nasir the Singer’s lovers. I attended another of Nasir’s performances and approached several members of his entourage. Offers of drinks and cash proved sufficient to pry from them the knowledge I sought. A few had been fortunate enough to be plucked from a crowd by Nasir’s hungry gaze. Most, however, had submitted themselves to a public pre-screening process which was monitored by Nasir’s closest associates.

This pre-screening process was operated by Boudoir Auditions, Inc., a flesh procurement outfit I had previously disdained. I was shocked to learn that the high-and-mighty Nasir the Singer would sully himself with such tawdry associations, until I discovered that high-status clients such as Nasir used it merely as a tool of convenience, a way to swiftly sift through the hundreds, if not thousands, of eager men who offered their bodies for such luminaries’ pleasure.

Well, if that was what it took, then that was what it took; the path to a mountain’s summit often requires first tromping through mud. I went to the offices of Boudoir Auditions. The wait was longer than I had expected; I had anticipated my notoriety as a recent immigrant from Mars would obtain for me preferred treatment, but I was told, rather rudely, that I would have to wait in queue with the common rabble. While waiting, I was required to fill out a questionnaire regarding my history of amorous experiences — how many partners; occupations and accomplishments of previous partners, plus photographs of them, if available; highest number of orgasms achieved in a single twenty-four hour period; any special qualifications (virgin? body artwork? prosthetic enhancements?); and lastly, general health status. There was also an option to attach letters of commendation.

Finally, I was led into a room which was lined entirely by what I assumed to be two-way mirrors. A voice from a hidden speaker instructed me that I should take off all my clothing and select, if I so wished, a costume from the choices available within the mirrored wardrobe in the corner. The voice informed me that I would be photographed and video recorded and that by signing my name to the questionnaire I had filled out, I had consented to all such photographic and videographic recordings to be made available for public viewing.

In for a penny, in for a pound, as the old European imperialist saying went. Before stripping off my own clothing, I went to the wardrobe to make my selection. Most of what was on offer was beneath my dignity, leather accouterments suitable for domesticated animals, harem silks meant for sissy-men, and other such submissive regalia. When I had almost despaired of finding a raiment even remotely appropriate for me, I lucked upon a costume which could have been purloined from the dressing room of The Thousand and One Nights: a Sinbad the Sailor ensemble, complete with a menacing (although wooden) scimitar. Wonderful! Faddey be damned — clothed in this heroic costume, I would show that dour pessimist that I could make myself irresistible to Nasir the Singer, or, for that matter, to any lover I might desire.

With the golden turban on my head and curved scimitar in hand I began striking valorous poses. The puffy sleeves of the costume allowed me to minimize exposure of my less-than-ideal arm. But then the voice on the loudspeaker announced No, no, no, that will not do. The voice instructed me to remove the costume’s flowing pantaloons and stimulate myself until I had achieved maximum rigidity. Then it coaxed me into assuming a series of humiliating tableaux. Suffice to say, the Sinbad costume was completely wasted upon the mortifying poses I was dragooned into, which cried out for the studded leather collar and dangling cow bell I had earlier disdained. What I was told to do with the scimitar I would rather not say; it was both undignified and most anxiety-inducing, considering the likelihood of splinters.

Throughout this ordeal, I only managed to maintain my composure by continually reminding myself of the mountain summit toward which I perilously climbed — the welcoming and exquisite embrace of Nasir the Singer. What heaven that would be! Heaven arduously gained through a season in Hell!

Ah, but little did I suspect the hell to which I would soon be subjected.

I waited long weeks for any notification from Nasir or his people that he would see me. Faddey was the first to inform me why such an invitation would never be proffered.

“Oh, my dear friend,” he said upon finding me in our favorite hookah café, “I am afraid you have opened yourself to ridicule most cruel. Did I not warn you that your pursuit of Nasir the Singer would result only in unhappiness?”

He pulled me two blocks distant to a popular but most uncouth drinking establishment. “Unfortunate one, you must see this,” he said, pushing me through the doors. The thoroughly soused patrons were all laughing uproariously at a video being played on a large viewing screen above the bar. It was I, in the Sinbad costume. The film had obviously been edited to portray me in the most ridiculous fashion possible. My dignified attempts to strike heroic poses had been intercut with the most degrading aspects of my misadventure, and the camera’s lens zoomed in again and again on my abnormal arm, the whole travesty set to music befitting a circus performance.

Rather than setting that vile establishment ablaze (they had not created the loathsome video, after all), I hied myself immediately to a lawyer, intending to ransack the bank accounts of Boudoir Auditions, Inc. as ruthlessly as Tamerlane had sacked Herat. The lawyer, a pusillanimous twig of a nonentity, timidly informed me that given the signature I had placed upon the questionnaire/contract, I had no standing to sue, and that the firm’s reputation for permitting its paying clients to engage in such wanton vandalism — reprehensible, but legal — was a matter of public record. Anyone with a physical handicap or disfigurement, he told me, should have known that Boudoir Auditions and its competitors were to be avoided like plague.

Four other lawyers subsequently peddled the same song of surrender to me. The so-called leadership of Salama refused to take any action on my behalf; obviously, their pockets had been lined by the same miscreants I was striving to bring to heel.

I was ruined. I had become universally recognizable on the streets of Salama, and the ridicule — not always whispered, sometimes thrown in my very face — could not be escaped. How was I to regain my reputation? I had been marked more severely than Cain, the world’s first murderer, yet what had I done? Striven mightily in the pursuit of love? Was this considered a capital crime in Salama, that “sanctuary of safety” more saturated with conniving whores than Babylon at her most debased?

I soon discovered that I had not been alone in my ordeal of public mortification and disgrace. Anyone who fell short of this community’s twisted ideal of male beauty — the short and stout; the massively fat; dwarfs and midgets; the club-footed and the lame; those with a lazy eye, or pocked skin, or receding chin, or, Allah forbid!, a tiny or malformed quadib — all were prone to being victimized as I had been.

There was no recourse. No court or magistrate to whom we could take our complaints. No possible appeal we could make to the consciences of the broader citizenry, entirely engrossed in their own selfish pleasures. We were a despised minority, we, the unlovely; barely tolerated among the larger population of Salama, just as all the inhabitants of Salama had once been barely tolerated within communities larger still, those composed primarily of heterosexualists.

After much meditation, I came to realize there was only one solution for us.

Complete separation. An eruvnet all our own.

Schism, Schism, Schism!

1.5

{Nofy in Keselamatan}

“Impossible!”

In my temporary quarters my blood runs so hot at the thought of Baruch Emmanuel I fear I might commit outrages of my own, offenses which could make even Ehmet Jian’s seem puny and pale. “That man! He contrives to make my work here impossible! He expects miracles from me! Does he think I can part the Red Sea of the Neuronet for him by stretching out a stick?”

My outburst makes Leah cringe. “Nofy, I apologize so for Mr. Emmanuel’s behavior toward you — please try to forgive him. You must understand, he is not used to having women contend with him, especially not in a professional context. Please never reveal to him that I have told you this, but when he first received news that Bradbury’s Department of Trade had selected you to come here, Mr. Emmanuel became very irate and demanded that they send a man instead. But the man at the Department of Trade insisted that you are the right person for this job, and vouched for your qualifications with great sincerity. Eventually, he convinced Mr. Emmanuel to accept you, but it was a struggle.”

I find myself chastened by the faith Pável Ilyich Davidov has placed in me; he, who barely knows me. How immature of me to express my frustrations in front of a client! I must watch my tongue.

At least with every passing moment, I feel more at home in my own skin, less dependent upon the support of my aid-suit. I gesture for Leah to sit. “Please forgive my outburst,” I say, settling myself at the modest table. “I must remind myself that law enforcement is the art of the possible, not the ideal. Particularly when one must operate in a foreign land.”

I need to systematize what facts I have. Plan a campaign which can make up in guile what it lacks in resources. “Given the evidence I have reviewed, Ehmet Jian’s first two murders appear to have been crimes of passion. Community politics resulted in a bitterly divisive Schism which he unsuccessfully fought against, and which resulted in his loss of access to his lover, Sikandar Qazi. Approximately one month after the Schism, Qazi died, apparently by his own hand—”

“He was poisoned,” Leah says. “It was almost certainly suicide.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“Sikandar was the reason for the Schism, the prize for which the two contending sides fought over. Ehmet Jian lost. The Little Men won, and they took Sikandar with them into their newly established eruvnet. None of the Little Men would have had any motive to harm Sikandar. They incited a Schism to take him away from Ehmet Jian, who Sikandar loved.”

“You followed this case?”

“I — I was present for part of its unfolding. Mordechai Habrachas served as the officiator for the Schism, the SchneerSon who certified the results of the vote. He brought me along as his technical assistant. I set up the parameters for the new eruvnet; the Little Men named it Minutia. I watched Ehmet Jian’s face when I pressed the button which made Sikandar vanish from his sight. Yes, such love is not permitted amongst the SchneerSons... but Nofy, never have I seen or heard an outburst of such passion as when Ehmet lost his Sikandar.”

“Is it certain that Jian knew of Sikandar’s apparent suicide in Minutia before he stabbed the two Little Men?”

She blushes — why? Does this lurid tale of homosexual passion and murder offend her sheltered sensibilities? “It — it can be assumed he found out. Otherwise, what would have precipitated his crimes?”

“You just told me how impassioned Jian became when Sikandar was taken away from him. Could this not have given him fuel for his murderous hatred all on its own?”

“Well, yes, I suppose. But there’s the matter of timing. Ehmet committed his murders less than two days after Sikandar’s death. A month had already passed since the Schism.”

“Perhaps he needed to take a month to plan his crime,” I say. “Crimes committed across eruvnets are not so easy to accomplish, are they? Not with the aversion settings programmed into everyone’s signachips? And how do you suppose Jian could have heard of Sikandar’s death? There are no shared news broadcasts, newspapers, or bulletin boards which cross eruvnet boundaries, so far as I know. In that respect, each of the City’s subcommunities might as well be floating on a separate asteroid hurling through space, rather than sitting atop one another—”

“There is some trade which occurs between subcommunities,” she says. “Many of the eruvnets are too small to be entirely self-sufficient. Word of Sikandar’s suicide could have filtered back into Ehmet’s subcommunity of `Ard Aljamal through trade exchanges.”

“Well, you would know that better than I would. This is helpful. Saying the facts aloud helps me think. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, of course not. I’m happy you want to use me as a sounding board.”

“One of our biggest unknowns is how Ehmet Jian, after having been sentenced to exile in Gehenna, managed to get his hands on a tuning unit. I assume you SchneerSons keep careful inventory of your essential equipment. Have any eruvnet or signachip tuning units been listed as missing?”

“No. I checked and double-checked before you arrived. All working units are accounted for.”

“Could any among your people have falsified the inventory records?”

“Who would do such a thing?” She looked appalled at my suggestion. “Maintaining and protecting the Neuronet is our sacred trust. Besides, your compatriots in Bradbury have added multiple layers of security to the system. Any tampering with records would set off alarms at several levels.”

After my talk with Baruch Emmanuel, it seems almost impossible to me that any SchneerSon would willingly collaborate with a criminal to do the Neuronet harm. Maintaining the system’s invisible fences is a matter of self-preservation for the SchneerSons, haunted as they are by the ghosts of past massacres. “It would appear the only other source for a tuning unit would be a sympathetic confederate in the Segregatronics Corporation, perhaps an old friend of Jian’s,” I suggest. “I’ll make some inquiries. But the possibility of a collaborator on Mars is a secondary concern at this point, one I’ll be better situated to run down once I’m back in Bradbury. When was the last time your Neuronet monitors caught a blip of Jian shifting to a different eruvnet?”

“About five hours ago.”

“Can you map those blips on your portable tuning unit?”

“Oh, yes, certainly.”

“We’ll make his most recent shift our first stop, then. Not that I expect we’ll be lucky enough to cross paths with him tonight. But we need to begin mapping out his pattern of shifting, if such pattern exists. The standard strategy of laying down a net of agents and then relying on civilian informants can’t be followed here. The way I see things, we have only two routes to catching him in this tangle of seventy-thousand mutually invisible subcommunities. Either we suss out a pattern to his offenses and successfully predict where he will go next, then arrive there first to lie in wait for him. Or we give him some reason to come to us. Unfortunately, these two options are mutually contradictory, depending on Jian’s capabilities.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was able to track me when I first entered the City, before you plugged me into the Neuronet and assigned my signachip an eruvnet. Which strategy will work for us depends almost entirely on whether he is still able to track me. If he can, then the notion of trying to skip ahead of him and lie in wait is senseless — he will know where I am, and so he will avoid shifting to that eruvnet. However, if he is unable to track me now that I am plugged into the Neuronet, then I can hardly expect him to come to me, no matter how much motivation I may provide him. What is your best guess, Leah, based on your knowledge of the Neuronet?”

“I — I can’t rightly say. There are too many variables at work, too many unknowns—”

I pat her arm to reassure her. “Don’t be too concerned over this. We’ll find out soon enough what his capabilities are. In the meantime, investigating his crime scenes and interviewing his victims will serve to advance both our possible strategies. It will allow us to begin developing a theory of his motives, plans, and patterns. And, should he be able to track my travels across the invisible fences of your City, he will know I am in pursuit, collecting evidence, and this will very likely give him strong reason to confront me.”

She eyes me uncertainly, probably remembering my humiliating clumsiness and incapacity at the musicians’ café. “Are you... prepared to confront him, if he does come to you?”

I could tell her about the automatic tasers with which my aid-suit is equipped. But I opt to keep that knowledge to myself, out of deference to her City’s prohibition on projectile weapons. “I will be ready,” I say. “Do not worry.”

“I can ensure that you are better prepared,” she says, her eyes alight with fresh purpose. “Let me help you, Nofy.”

“How?”

“There isn’t time for me to train you on the comprehensive operations of a full tuning unit. But what I can do is add some of the basic functionality of a tuning unit to your aid-suit’s software matrix. Just enough functionality to give you the upper hand should Ehmet Jian suddenly shift into your eruvnet and ambush you.”

The notion of allowing anyone to tamper with my aid-suit, even a trusted ally, is disquieting. The lame woman unwillingly surrenders her crutch to be whittled upon, even if the carver is her village’s greatest artisan. “What does this entail?”

“Not very much. I’ll add a few buttons to your array and download some software packets from my tuning unit into your suit’s memory. I can grant you the ability to back-shift among the last three eruvnets you’ve entered. Pressing a different button will allow you to exit the Neuronet entirely. I can’t give you full independent Neuronet navigation tools without giving you your own tuning unit, which my superiors wouldn’t allow. Those limited capabilities I just mentioned will only work when you’re within a fifty meter radius of my unit, less than that if we are separated by walls. But at least you’ll have some independent control, in case of an emergency. That way, you won’t be entirely dependent upon me.”

I easily picture how such enhancements could save my life. I have little fear Jian could successfully attack me with an edged weapon, like he did his first three victims; his approaching within six meters with what the aid-suit determines to be aggressive intent would result in his being disabled by my tasers, a preferred outcome, for sure. But if he has acquired a gun? Being able to instantly shift to a formerly occupied eruvnet with the press of a button could hide me from his sight for a few decisive seconds. Or dropping out of the Neuronet entirely... palsy would return to my muscles, but I would instantly gain awareness of the full range of cover surrounding me, things I could use either as shields or weapons.

So I offer myself to Leah’s ministrations — for during my years in Bradbury I have come to consider my aid-suit a part of myself. “Go ahead,” I say. “Before we begin our chase, work your magic.”

We board a streetcar at the terminus of Balarang Avenue. Although the car appears empty, my signachip blurts aversion signals to my muscles as I pass seat after seat filled with invisible passengers. Leah grabs a hanging strap near the back of the car; I do the same. I am taken back two decades and more, to those endless afternoons when I wandered the City aboard seemingly empty streetcars, holding a leather strap while standing at the back.

The City has not upgraded to air-conditioning its streetcars in the years since I departed, but relief from the morning’s heat comes soon. The vehicle’s electric motor hums into renewed life and the car lurches into motion, its forward passage creating breezes which flow through the car’s open windows.

I decide to experiment with one of my new abilities and press the freshly installed red button on the left wrist of my aid-suit. Immediately, just as Leah promised, I am vomited forth from the belly of the Neuronet. I sense my palsy’s leaden return, but my aid-suit compensates, providing me just enough strength and coordination to continue clinging to the leather strap overhead. All of my fellow passengers are now visible to me; I see the car is completely filled. The breezes flowing from the front bring a pungent miscellany of strong aromas — body odors, workers’ sweat, skin scents made tangy or sour by varying spices consumed. All those childhood years of riding the City’s streetcars, oftentimes on a stiflingly hot day like today, and never until now have I smelled the perspiring armpits of another passenger.

The streetcar sways gently from side to side as it picks up speed. Despite the dangers of my present endeavor, a sweet pall of nostalgia descends upon me. So little has changed here in the past fourteen years. I stare out the windows at the clusters of apartment buildings and shops along Balarang Avenue, the apartment blocks, four, five, or six stories high, made of the same gray stone as the municipal buildings in Queen Elizabeth Square, their tall, narrow windows also serving as doors onto tiny balconies that hang over the avenue. As a girl, I imagined such places as ghost villages, abandoned locales haunted by angatra, stubborn ghosts who will not leave, and plagued with kalamoro, mischievous imps. Yet now I see they are bustling with residents. The balconies of one block are crowded with dusky men in turbans smoking long pipes, or women in flowing saris hanging laundry. The balconies of the next building host mainly short, wiry men whose jaws chew incessantly and who wear no shirts, the coppery skin of their chests marked with tribal runes of scarification. And then there is a building where pale, blond-haired children, completely naked, run from shadowed rooms onto the sun-drenched balconies, shrieking with the excitement of play, ignoring the admonishing shouts of their mothers.

All those neighbors I was never aware of. All those children with whom I might have played, only I never heard their happy greetings. They do not see me now, as I did not see them then. To those children on the balconies, I am merely an angatra. A ghost who will not leave.

Keselamatan is an enclave made up entirely of ethnic Malays, all followers of a peculiar religio-political mutation of twentieth century Chinese communism. Physically, it is located just two kilometers northeast of Baruch Emmanuel’s office in Queen Elizabeth Square. Psychically, it is a planetary orbit distant. Its inhabitants eagerly await the celestial transfiguration of Mao Zedong, whom they claim will return to Earth in his true form, as a Malay, and will free the aboriginal Malays from their economic and social subjugation to the ethnic Chinese in their midst, then establish an egalitarian utopia of Confucian and Muhammadian virtue. Except, of course, in Keselamatan, there are no ethnic Chinese. Or at least there are not supposed to be.

Based upon Leah’s insistent advice, I allow her to adjust my signachip so that I appear, both to others and to myself, as a Malay man. She does likewise for herself. I grumbled at this change of sex, feeling it demeaning, but Leah argued that the man with whom we need speak, Comrade Supreme Iman Panjang bin Wira, would refuse to meet with us if we /remained perceivably female.

Bin Wira is a squat, fleshy man dressed in resplendent robes of purple and gold. He insists we meet him at the Barham Square House of Worship, which in Keselamatan is known, in rough translation, as Long March Resting Sanctuary of Holy Comrade Mao Zedong. We enter the sanctuary to find workers who appear to be of East African origin (contract laborers from another eruvnet, I assume) scrubbing what may be dried blood from a marble altar and statues and grand portraits of a man I presume to be the Holy Comrade Zedong. Bin Wira, agitated, eyes bulging from his puffy face, intercepts us before we reach the back pews. “You are the SchneerSons, am I right?” he says, voice choked with indignation. “This is where it happened! This is where my people were defiled by a devil! A devil who has the powers of a SchneerSon!”

I watch Leah, cybernetically disguised as a Malay man, wilt beneath the implied accusation. “Any outrages committed here were not performed by a SchneerSon,” I say. “We are seeking a renegade, a multiple murderer who was sentenced to Gehenna but somehow managed to use his technical skills to escape—”

“Is he ethnic Chinese? The man I saw who splashed the blood of pigs into our holy sanctuary and defiled its corridors with the dirty carcasses of dogs was Chinese. But he could have been a SchneerSon pretending to be a hated Chinese, just as you pretend to be Malay—”

“That is an evil defamation,” Leah says in a half whisper, her voice choked.

“He is a Uyghur named Ehmet Jian,” I interject, “of Muslim heritage, much like you and your people. According to my dossier, he probably hates the Han Chinese as much as you do. He grew up on Mars, in the colony of Bradbury, then emigrated to your City, ultimately joining an eruvnet community called ‘Ard Aljamal. After playing an instrumental role in two separate Schisms, he was involved in what is believed to be a crime of passion, killing two men. He was then exiled to Gehenna. By unknown means, he managed to escape, most likely using pilfered equipment and the tech skills he remembered from Bradbury. After his escape, he continued committing crimes. I myself witnessed him slit a SchneerSon musician’s throat. Now he is jumping from eruvnet to eruvnet, leaving a trail of mayhem—”

“You are pursuing him?” bin Wira says. “When he is caught, you will turn him over to us for punishment? I can assure you, we will not make the error of merely banishing him to Gehenna.”

“We are pursuing him, yes. But I’m afraid that handing him over to your community cannot be done.”

“What? This is outrageous—”

“Jian has committed serious crimes against multiple eruvnet communities. None of these have superior jurisdictional rights over the others, not even the SchneerSons’ Eruv Rav, which Jian has also committed offenses against. When Jian escaped from Gehenna, he was stripped of his citizenship in your City. He reverted to his prior citizenship, that of a Bradburian. That is why, when I apprehend him, I will take him back with me to Mars.”

Now his eyes truly bulged from his head. “You are an outworlder? The SchneerSons consort with a Martian?”

Oh, these people and their xenophobia! One of the reasons I fled the City! “I am a Bradburian, yes. A Bradburian law enforcement officer. Jian is my responsibility. Now, who here witnessed Jian’s offenses in this sanctuary?”

“I myself did witness them,” bin Wira says. “I was conducting the Holy Service of the Red Star when the invader entered with his foul implements and began his unspeakable desecration. That devil seeks to rush the Eschaton, you know? He seeks to deny us the favor of the Holy One, the Returned Mao, blessings be upon him. That cursed creature must know that tribulations are the echoes of the Holy Mao’s footsteps, that the Great Zedong will not return to Earth until the hated Chinese have vented their wrath upon the Malays. By heaping tribulations upon us, the invader hopes to bring Holy Mao out of Heaven, to prematurely usher in his judgment. But we of Keselamatan are not yet ready. We have not yet fully cleansed our community of impure words and thoughts.”

“What do you mean, Comrade Supreme Iman?” Leah asks, surprising me. I thought she had been so thoroughly insulted at the outset that she would stand silent as a stone.

“I quail to admit such a failing on our part, but we have not yet completed our Great Leap Forward. Our people labor long hours at libraries throughout the City, banishing books from our eruvnet which conflict with the teachings of Holy Comrade Mao, blessings be upon him. But there are hundreds of thousands of books, and each book contains hundreds of thousands of words, and each word must be weighed and judged for its accordance with the sayings of the Holy One. Should the devilish machinations of the demon Jian — may his name be blotted out from the memories of men! — succeed in ushering forth the premature return of Holy Comrade Mao before we have completed our Great Leap Forward, the Holy One will forsake us, he will choose to save a people more worthy than we Malays—“

An ominous buzzing issues from the tuning unit bound to Leah’s wrist. She flips open its screen. Seconds later, she turns to me, her pained concern obvious, even projected through her cybernetic mask.

“Nofy, he’s shifted again. I hate telling you this... but Ehmet Jian has gone to Anarako Arivo.”

My birth clan’s home. Lost home of my heart.

2.4

{Ehmet in `Ard Aljamal}

Since I had become so notorious on the streets of Salama, publicly jeered at as Sinbad the Laughable, or Sinbad the Self-Impaler, all those who fell short of Salama’s tyrannical beauty standards knew I shared their grievances. So I encountered no difficulty whatsoever in claiming the mantle of their spokesman, their advocate, their champion. And I exercised the scepter of leadership vigorously.

“Follow me to a land where we shall be free to set our own standards of beauty!” I trumpeted. “Schism is the answer, the only answer! Be not afraid of change! Schism with me! All you have to lose are the shackles of ridicule, rejection, and contempt!”

My speeches inspired a multitude of the despised, and my calls for Schism were echoed by thousands of the heretofore dispossessed. Not a word of protest was heard from the leaders and luminaries of Salama regarding my campaign, ratifying our direst notions of their prejudice toward us. Clearly, they would be happy to see us gone.

Ultimately, I represented a tad more than forty-five hundred persons when I presented to an official of the SchneerSons our petition for Schism. Thousands more could have opted to join us, but were apparently too afraid of losing access to their preferred jobs or Salama’s boisterous nightlife. They were free to choose misery, I suppose, having demonstrated their servile willingness to accept the yoke of second class citizenry in exchange for a few scraps from the tables of their “betters”. I did not often quote the poets of the European imperialists, but I heartily agreed with John Milton’s famed maxim: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

It was distasteful to me having to deal with the Jew, Mordechai of the SchneerSons, but necessary. He and he alone held the keys to our new kingdom. I must admit he was helpful; indeed, he proved almost fawning in his solicitude, the precise opposite of the “worthies” of Salama. He pointed out that with fewer than five thousand initial inhabitants, `Ard Aljamal — that was the name we had chosen for our new eruvnet; in Arabic, it meant Land of Beauty, a declaration of our intent to subvert conventional notions of attractiveness — would most likely not encompass among its limited citizenry the full panoply of skills necessary for an autonomous community’s functioning. He offered a solution: groups of professionals from other eruvnets who, seeking maximum profits, offered their wares and services to any and all eruvnets willing to do business with them. The Jew made quite an extensive menu of commercial alliances available to us, with each option fully tailorable. If we wanted to avail ourselves of the services of Ashkenazic Jew physicians, for example, but did not wish to be made aware of their baleful presence any more than absolutely necessary, we could choose that our eruvnet’s settings would make them perceptible to us only on certain days of the month. Similarly, if we wished to occasionally enjoy performances by a Chinese-European orchestra but were repelled by the notion of having to look at their imperialist faces, we could have our eruvnet adjusted so that only the sound of their music would be available to us, not the sight or smell of the assembled musicians.

A delightful invention, this Neuronet! How strange, I thought, that I had labored so many years on Mars to maintain and perfect it, yet I had never truly contemplated its utility. It allowed tiny minorities such as us to enjoy all the advantages of a city teeming with eight million inhabitants, picking and choosing any goods and services which appealed to us, while at the same time preserving our distinctiveness and maximizing our autonomy.

The choicest aspect by far of having precipitated a successful Schism was that I immediately became the most honored and revered member of my community — and the most desirable. In the erotic pecking order, I went from (in Salama) the flea-infested rodent hiding beneath the palace stairs to (in `Ard Aljamal) the worshiped god-king ensconced in the golden throne.

I filled my nights with erotic trysts — oh, those Thousand and One Nights! And yet, despite the endless variety, despite the meticulous attentions lavished upon me by a parade of eager lovers, I found that something was missing. As time went on, my lovers held less and less appeal for me. I caught myself obsessing on their flaws... this one’s overbite and lisp; that one’s protrusive mole between his eyebrows, as jarring as a third eye; this one’s pigeon toes and greasy skin; that one’s unnervingly loud flatulence during the act of love. I rebuked myself — had my erotic imagination been so thoroughly colonized by the oppressive beauty standards of the Salamites? Or, worse, by the tyrannical aesthetics of the heterosexualists, imperialists, and ableists I had been forced to fraternize with in Bradbury?

I tried to force such self-defeating obsessions from my mind, telling myself they were corrosive, invading memes planted there by my past enemies. Yet the harder I strove to eliminate them, the more intensely such obsessions bedeviled me. This psychological turmoil affected me in the worst way possible. I found myself unable to sustain an erection. The mere thought of sharing my body with any of the human atrocities who petitioned to crawl beneath my sheets made my gorge rise.

Overcome by disgust at the shambling monstrosities who surrounded me, I had nearly resigned myself to a lifetime of celibacy when at last I perceived my salvation. There, in a hookah café in Barham Square, sitting like a miniature angel upon a booster seat so that he might more easily inhale the vapors, was the most exquisite creature I had been blessed to look upon since my initial glimpse of Nasir the Singer. A midget, surrounded at his table by fellow midgets and comparatively grotesque dwarfs. Flawless almond skin, delicate fingers, noble shoulders, the face of a warrior-saint... but small, compact, as though a far larger, more coarsely made man had been condensed into perfection by immense pressure, like a lump of coal compressed by the weight of Earth’s mantle into a diamond.

He turned his shining face to me, undoubtedly sensing the psychic weight of my gaze, and smiled. And, oh, that smile! It completed the conquest of my heart. I knew at that instant that I could no longer live if I could not have this child-man as my lover.

I, who during my entire time in `Ard Aljamal had been as confident and headstrong as Saladin in selecting lovers, suddenly found myself as shy and hesitant as a virgin. The thought that I might be rejected by him tortured me, a volley of flaming arrows which pierced my heart. I spied upon his interactions with his fellows, trying to determine which of them, if any, claimed him for their own. My diamond was consistently fawned upon by midgets and dwarfs alike, obviously a prize to be contested for. But who were these nonentities who surrounded him? Little people, in all senses of that diminutizing modifier. In contrast, who was I? Why, none other than these wretches’ liberator, their champion and savior. Did they not owe me everything?

I called over the waiter, a man afflicted with a most unfortunate harelip, and directed him to deliver a bottle of the café’s most expensive vintage to my petite angel, along with a note. I watched my living jewel accept the wine with a delicate look of surprise. Then, as he read the note, a most appealing blush overtook his features. He turned once more to look upon me, to thank me. Our eyes met. Wordlessly I summoned him, relying upon the palpable lines of electricity which surged between us. He climbed down from his booster seat, then approached my table like a somnambulist striding across a grassy field covered in evening’s fog.

His departure from his companions caused consternation at his table, but what of it? Those dwarfs and pixies were clearly unworthy of him, bits of pyrite and pig iron seeking to hide the glory of the gold in their midst. But that glory would not remain hidden — it was mine to claim, mine, my reward for all the suffering I had been forced to endure.

I shared a rare vintage with the exquisite Sikandar Qazi that evening, but no sips of the nectar of fermented grapes were necessary to intoxicate me. Or, apparently, him. What followed was bliss such as I had never known. Many have said that having cannot compare with wanting, but such was never remotely the case with Sikandar Qazi. His conversation proved every bit as delightful as his love-making. Following some minor initial awkwardness, he admitted, shamefacedly, that I was the first “big” lover he had ever accommodated, but far from being off-putting, this admission only inflamed my passion all the more. We eagerly flipped through the gilt-edged pages of his copy of the venerated Kama Sutra, a book I had previously avoided due to its Hindu origins, but which I now accepted because my petite angel so delighted in it. What endless hours of enchantment we relished as we tirelessly experimented with those couplings, adjusted, of course, to lovers of vastly disparate size.

I could deny nothing to my precious Sikandar. Not even other lovers, although I bitterly resented every moment he was not in my embrace. My darling stated in all sincerity that the custom among his people, the little men who love other little men, was that no lover was enjoyed exclusively, and that love was freely shared amongst all. His eyes filled with tears as he explained to me that any abrogation of this custom on his part would result in his being ostracized by his fellows, and his very soul would shrivel. I had not the heart to make him dread censure from his clan, so I, confident in my superiority to any lover he might take among the little men, magnanimously allowed him one night in three to go frolic amongst his fellows. Of course, how I grinned inwardly as I listened to his pillow-talk revelations that my mighty ministrations had rendered him unsuitable to receive love from his diminutive fellows, much to their jealous woe!

I would not be seen in public without my Sikandar. When he complained of the difficulty he had in matching my strides in the streets, I had built for him a special, one-of-a-kind rickshaw cart in which I could transport him; I had it lined with padded ox leather and goose down pillows, its edges highlighted with hammered gold. I dressed my darling in flowing silks and encouraged him to paint his eyelids in vibrant shades, to adorn his lovely arms and hands with henna tattoos. No one in `Ard Aljamal could boast of a more pampered or more exquisite lover.

I thought I had finally achieved my earthly paradise. Yet little did I recognize the dark clouds gathering above my redoubt of happiness.

The first shadows I noticed were those which intruded one night upon the heavenly face of my Sikandar. To see any unhappiness marring his aspect was like unto the approach of death itself. “My precious darling,” I said as I cut his meat for him into tiny, neat morsels, “what has caused you to frown so? Is the meal not to your liking? Do you wish for different music to be played? Merely say so, and I will have the musicians dismissed, the distasteful food tossed to the dogs and the isolates, and a fresh meal prepared—”

He shook his head, and I saw tears glimmering in the orbs of his flawless eyes. “No, Ehmet, nothing here is amiss. It is just that... oh, this is so hard to say!”

My heart plunged like a rock dropped into a bottomless well. “Sikandar, have I... dissatisfied you? Tell me, precious one. Tell me anything, hold nothing back! Everything can be made right! We have shared paradise, and we will share it again!”

“It... it is Bora Ali. You know him, slightly. He is one of my closest and most influential clan associates. He is like an uncle to me. From birth, I have been under his protection.”

“And what of this Bora Ali? What has he said or done to darken your face and disturb the peace of our table?”

“He... he does not approve of our relationship, Ehmet.”

Despite my concern for Sikandar’s feelings, I laughed at the absurdity of it. “And who is he to disapprove? What can any other man’s disapproval matter to our exalted love, our thrice-blessed universe of two?”

He would no longer meet my eyes. “Bora Ali is considered by all the caliph of the Little Men. His word has the force of law among my clan.”

I felt rage gathering within my breast. “What has he said against me?”

“He has said... that you dishonor all Little Men through your actions. That you fetishize my small stature because it makes you feel big. That you humiliate me and diminish me in public by carrying me about in the rickshaw and dressing me as you do — ‘like a baby’s doll,’ he says. That whether you realize it or not, you are sizeist, through and through.”

The rage within me boiled over. I flung my plate against the wall of our private dining room. “Calumnies! I will rip his tiny, lying tongue from his mouth! You know this is all nothing more than an impotent expression of jealousy, don’t you, Sikandar? Has this ‘uncle’ of yours ever tried having his way with you? I know why he seeks to tear me down! He is disgusted by his own inadequacy, that his quadib is no larger than a howler monkey’s, and he can no longer provide you pleasure because I have rendered you unfit for such puny instruments. Because I have made you mine. I will speak with him this very night, I will convince him to silence his lying tongue—”

“No!” Sikandar’s tears flowed freely. “You mustn’t, Ehmet! He is my close kinsman! The caliph of my clan! You mustn’t disrespect or dishonor him, you mustn’t!”

The Greeks had their Achilles, their mightiest of champions who was brought low by a seemingly insignificant weakness, the uncharmed nature of his heel. Prominent though I was, mighty in esteem, I could no more stand against Sikandar’s tears than could a pebble against a raging flood.

I pulled him close, nestled his precious head against my chest so that I could no longer see his tears. Yet I could feel them against my skin, trickling down my bosom, leaving traces from my heart like escaping rivulets of life’s blood. “Sikandar, my dearest darling, stop your tears... I repent of my intentions. I will not confront your kinsman — not that he does not richly deserve my rebuke. But I refrain out of purest love for you. Nor do I wish you to suffer the condemnation of your clan. I will make... all efforts to conform to the expectations of the Little Men in my public behavior toward you.”

And that tender-hearted accommodation proved my fatal undoing. For my enemies, Bora Ali chief among them, scented weakness in my concern for my beloved’s feelings... perceived that I, so much grander than they in stature, could be made to stumble and lick the dust at their stunted feet.

I sold the gilded rickshaw and all its fineries. In public, I had Sikandar walk at my side, retarding my stride so that he could keep pace with me.

Yet this retreat on my part proved insufficient for the sensitivities of the Little Men. I felt their malicious, reproachful gazes follow us as we walked past the cafés where they gathered and the repair shops where they worked. Their gazes, freighted with dark accusation.

No more than a month had passed since I had been forced to divest us of the gilded rickshaw when Sikandar again approached me in tears. “What troubles you now, you who put the stars to shame?” I said, fearing the answer.

“My people... they say you remain sizeist in your heart.”

“In my heart? How can they see what is in my heart? Are they mind readers, as well as menders of clocks?”

“They see it in your stride, Ehmet. In how you walk when you are beside me, they read bad intentions—”

“How is such misperception even possible? Is it not obvious to all that I have slowed my steps so that you need not hurry to keep pace with me?”

“They say you silently mock me. They say you exaggerate the effort you put into unnaturally slowing your walk so that you may silently insult my diminutude. You place upon them a most heavy burden of belittlement, they say.”

“This is absurd! You know I have no intention whatsoever of insulting your people. Did I not follow their wishes regarding the rickshaw, at considerable financial detriment? Does not that prove my sincerity?”

“They say intentions do not matter. They say aggrievement is measured by the feelings of the aggrieved, not by the intentions of the offender.”

“But — but that isn’t fair at all! What possible recourse can one have, if accusations of harm can be hurled without a shred of proof? According to your clan, I am guilty of insulting Little Men if I slow my pace to match yours; I am guilty if I walk at my normal pace; and I am equally or perhaps more guilty if I pull you behind me in a cushioned rickshaw. How am I not to be guilty? What do they expect me to do when accompanying you in public? To not accompany you at all?”

He offered no answer, instead staring at his feet. No answer from him was necessary. I already knew what the Little Men wanted.

Not long after, I was on my way to work at the Water Center, about to cross through Mahatma Gandhi Square, when I espied a parade of dwarfs and midgets circling the central fountain, all carrying placards. I paused to listen to their chants:

“No Big domination! It’s abomination!”

“Big hands off Little People!”

“Sizeism is the problem! Schism is the solution!”

“We’re not pets! We’re not toys! We’re not your little snuggly boys!”

Thank Allah I did not see Sikandar among them! Such a sight would have ground my heart to dust. I hurried to my office, feeling unseen djinns pursuing me through the air, eager to drain all happiness from me.

During one of Sikandar’s nights away from me, while I comforted myself before my fire with a book of amusing tales, I was startled by an insistent knock upon my door. When I opened it, at first I saw no one and thought a prankster had knocked and then fled. But then I heard the clearing of a throat and looked down. It was Bora Ali, the dwarf. Sikandar’s “uncle.”

“May I come in?” he said in a voice both high-pitched and gruff.

I would rather have invited a cobra into my parlor, but I ushered him inside.

“There is something urgent we must discuss, Ehmet Jian,” he said. “You have been setting a most distressing example for your fellow Bigs here in `Ard Aljamal. An example which must come to an immediate end. Although we all appreciate your prior service in liberating us from the Salamists, such past virtue does not excuse your current offenses.”

“‘Offenses’?” I was tempted to take up a fireplace iron and strike this impudent insect until he was no more than a red smear. But I held my temper with the strength of a lion. “Tell me, Bora Ali, how exactly have I offended against you, a person with whom I have never spoken or done business?”

“You have misused your position of public esteem by setting an injurious example. Your conduct with Sikandar Qazi has made it fashionable for Bigs to take Little Men as lovers.”

“So a fad has taken root? How am I to blame for the conduct of other men in their bedrooms? There isn’t a court on Earth or Mars which would declare me culpable for this supposed ‘crime’ you accuse me of.”

“Culpability is not at issue here. Only the baleful outcomes matter. We Little Men are being subjugated and objectivized by the oppressive erotic imaginations of you Bigs. Your lofty gaze assaults us, whether that be a gaze of contempt or a gaze of lust. There are only two possible recourses we can seek. Either you can renounce your relationship with Sikandar Qazi, publicly repent your crime of sizeism, and implore your fellow Bigs to do the same. Or, if you refuse, there will be Schism, and you will never see Sikandar again so long as you live.”

That smug little mouth. Those cruel eyes, hidden like poisonous beetles within folds of pustulant flesh. He was the minute exemplar of all the dark forces which had ever conspired against me. I wanted to obliterate him from existence. But I retained enough mental wherewithal, even thrashing about within the molten core of my rage, to suspect he was trying to provoke me — that he wanted me to physically attack him, because he had positioned confederates outside my windows to witness my assault upon their leader... the better to justify Schism, which I believed to be his ultimate goal.

“Get out of my home,” I said, my voice barely cloaking the chaos within me. To restrain my hands, I forced my thumbs through my belt loops, all the while imagining I was forcing them through his eye sockets. “I will never renounce Sikandar, and he will never leave me. We are one, he and I, until the end of time and all things. Do not seek to disrupt what you cannot comprehend, dwarf.”

He smiled, and I realized with dawning horror that I had said precisely what he had wished me to. “Then you make Schism inevitable,” he crowed.

No! Never! “Under the rules to which every man of `Ard Aljamal has pledged to follow,” I said with repressed heat, “two-thirds of the community must approve any proposed Schism for it to take effect. I will speak against it, loudly and indefatigably. How can you expect your word will prevail against mine? I need only to convince one third plus one that you should stay. And even if you should manage somehow to work a feat of sorcery and win the referendum, Sikandar would choose to remain with me.”

“Oh, Sikandar will accompany his clan wherever we choose to go. You have no idea how tightly he is bound to us. And do not flatter yourself, Martian, by thinking your reputation is an unassailable fortress. Any fortress wall can be breached. To take but one example, there is the matter of your Martian perfidy, often discussed in hushed whispers. Your use of Martian technological wizardry to subtly alter your signachip, so that you made yourself irresistible to Sikandar Qazi. Ensorceled the poor, innocent lad, in fact—”

“That is a base lie!”

“Is it?” His beetle eyes glimmered darkly. “I am sure you have heard it said: a lie can traverse the eight walls of the City before the truth has crossed the threshold of a single house. Persist in your stubbornness, Ehmet Jian, and you will bring ruin down upon your head. This I promise you.”

Bora Ali, that potbellied demon-piglet, proved true to his threat. He petitioned the SchneerSons for Schism. The referendum was scheduled for one month from the day of petition. I worked tirelessly to convince my fellow citizens to deny Schism, putting aside my paying job to speechify and distribute pamphlets over a marathon stretch of eighteen hour days.

More and more, however, I had to defend myself from a flood of scurrilous rumors — that I was a Martian spy, or a closeted heterosexualist. Or, most grotesque of all, that I had sliced off Sikandar’s quadib, placed it in preservative fluid in a pickle jar, and used my Martian technology to make him a mechanical replacement, which I would only allow him to use so long as he remained my slave.

The demonic spite of Bora Ali and his criminal gang of Little Men knew no limit. Some credulous fools believed their atrocious slanders, but most men outside their tiny circle recoiled from such hateful tactics. Yet such revulsion did not redound to my benefit. Even close confidants approached me to hesitantly voice the opinion that, given the Little Men’s ruthlessness and cutthroatery, perhaps it would be better for all if they left. After all, if they were willing to so savagely attack me, the father of `Ard Aljamal, who next might fall victim to their tiny fangs?

Sikandar wasted away. He would not eat. Throughout the month leading to the referendum, I watched his flesh melt from his precious bones, as though he were victim to a dreadful cancer. His desire for lovemaking vanished. The angelic effervescence which had once animated his eyes dimmed like a dying flame. At night he lay in bed beside me, a bundle of sticks, his breathing barely detectable.

The dread day arrived. I had pressed my shoulder to the burden of my cause with as much vigor as man or demigod could expend, yet I knew before the first vote was cast that I had lost. Bora Ali’s strategy had been equally odious and brilliant. His monstrous calumnies succeeded either in making me repugnant to the voters or making him and his Little Men repugnant; either way, he persuaded our fellow citizens to choose the option he wanted.

The SchneerSons certified the voting tallies. They announced that Schism would proceed. For the great majority of the citizens of `Ard Aljamal, this change would cause less than a vanishing ripple in their lives; the Little Men amongst us numbered fewer than sixty, and the SchneerSons could arrange matters so that their specialized skills of clock repair and mending of household engines would still remain accessible to us. But for some of us, those few who had known the paradise of Little-Big love? Our world came crashing down, then ignited into flame.

I trembled as if with fever. Approaching the desiccated wreck who was my Sikandar to ask the question I must was akin to walking across glowing coals with naked feet. “Sikandar, my dearest darling, most precious jewel in all creation... will you stay with me?”

I waited for his parched lips to move. Those lips, which only weeks ago had provided me with ecstasies unimaginable, now quivered with palsied impotence, as though they had forever lost the power of speech.

“If you stay, Sikandar... if you stay, if you will only eat and allow yourself to get well, I will be all things to you. Lover, father, husband, brother, son, uncle, clansman, worshiper... even slave.”

I would have abased myself in any and all ways for him. If it would have restored him to robust healthfulness, I would have flayed off my own skin, cooked it for him until tender, and fed it to him with fleshless fingers.

Yet it was all in vain, in vain. Like trying to irrigate a desert with a thimbleful of water, or breathe the atmosphere of Mars. Bora Ali, may his black soul be thrice damned to the most sulphurous pit of Hell, had been right.

My status as a community leader of `Ard Aljamal obligated me to be present at the finalization of Schism, the ceremony at which the departing citizens of `Ard Aljamal would be granted membership in the new community of Minutia, and all administrative matters would be finalized. The SchneerSons were again represented by Mordechai the Jew. But this time, he had brought an assistant with him, a black-clad woman he did not bother to introduce to us. Lowly female factotum, she performed the monotonous yet intricate work of adjusting the Little Men’s signachips and entering the newly required restrictions on the settings of `Ard Aljamal’s and Minutia’s eruvnets.

I watched her pale fingers tap upon the keys of her portable tuning unit. In that portion of my mind where the engineer in me held sway, I understood all too well that every tap of her fingertips represented a hammer blow on the nails of the lid of my coffin. Yet it felt too terrible to be real. Was Allah so cruel? Did love and devotion lack all potency? Was the universe nothing more than Newton’s clock, oblivious to the needs and passions of men, a soulless mechanism maintained by a dwarf?

I scanned the auditorium for Sikandar. Alas, a phalanx of Little Men surrounded him, hiding him from me, denying me even a final glimpse of my eternal love.

Mordechai asked Bora Ali to certify the list of persons who would be transferring to Minutia’s newly created eruvnet. Searching my soul, I realized my pride meant less to me than the vanished seas of Mars. It had been crushed out of me like oil from a bushel of olives. What was pride, compared to the unbearable reality of my heart being ripped from my breast?

I inserted myself between the Jew and Bora Ali and fell to my knees. “I have a petition to make!” I cried. “I want to renounce my citizenship in `Ard Aljamal! I want to become a citizen of Minutia!”

“Impossible,” the dwarf sneered.

“I know how to adjust my signachip! I can make it so that everyone in Minutia will perceive me as a midget!”

“It would not matter. You would remain a Big. We would not have you among us.”

“Please, Bora Ali! I will do anything you wish! I will clean toilets. I will collect trash from the streets — I will pick up the defecations of wandering dogs with my hands. You could savor the pleasure of humiliating me daily over the span of our remaining lives. Only... allow me to walk the same streets, smell the same aromas, hear the same music as Sikandar does. For the mercy of Allah, allow me to share his eruvnet, even if we may never touch...”

“It is a sincere petition, properly presented,” Mordechai the Jew said. “Bora Ali, do you wish to confer with your fellow citizens before the list of Schismites is certified as complete and final?”

“No consultation is necessary,” the dwarf said coldly. “The whole reason for the establishment of Minutia is so that we Little Men who love other Little Men can have a safe space of our own. As emir, I would be grossly remiss in my duties were I to permit our safe space to be violated. We of Minutia will permit limited contact with citizens of certain other, approved eruvnets to allow for our trade in clock and engine repairs to continue, as well as other necessary commerce. However, due to his past offenses against us, we declare that Ehmet Jian shall never again perceive the citizens of Minutia, nor shall any citizen of Minutia perceive him.”

A piercing wail arose from within the circle of Little Men. I recognized my darling’s voice.

I remained crumpled on the floor, listening to the unnamed woman tapping upon her keys. I looked up at her, the last person to whom I could address my silent plea, even though I knew she lacked all agency in this matter. She was merely Mordechai’s tool, and thus Bora Ali’s. She paused from her accursed work to meet my grief-saturated gaze. Although she was both woman and Jewess, I sensed she understood the magnitude of my torment. There was pity in her face, pity which I could not bear, but also empathy, and genuine regret at my abasement. Alas, she was as powerless as I.

She pressed a key one last time. My Sikandar vanished from my world, like a dream stripped from one’s consciousness by the rising of the sun.

1.6

{Nofy in Anarako Arivo}

Anarako Arivo. Home of my heart. Home which broke my heart.

Leah and I disembark from the Burrup Avenue streetcar at the ring road surrounding Lachlan Square, the northernmost of the City’s seventeen public squares. Even as a young girl, I thought it strange that my ancestral clan, upon fleeing from Madagascar, had chosen the district farthest from the sea in which to resettle; for we Betsimisaraka had always been coastal people, not highlanders like the Merina and Sihanaka clans. Perhaps my forefathers and foremothers had not wished to be reminded of the seaside home they had lost, so they had selected a neighborhood pressed against the northernmost of the City’s eight walls, where the sounds of the ocean would never intrude. If that were indeed the case, I now understand their desire to put a forsaken home far from their thoughts.

It began as such a trivial matter, the Schism which made me walk away from the City. Nandrianina, mother of my best friend, Mialy, broke her ankle when she dismounted badly from a step ladder. Mialy’s father insisted that his wife continue to do all of the household chores, even though she was encumbered by crutches and a cast. Nandrianina was a strong-willed woman, never one to take umbrage from either her children or the other women in our village, but until now, she had been reliably subservient to her husband. Yet the parochial injustice of his insistence that she continue with her labors as though she were uninjured shattered the restraints tradition had placed on her. She refused his demands. Flamboyantly refused them. When he handed her the filled water bucket and commanded her to water the family’s quartet of sheep, she hurled the bucket in his face, bloodying his nose.

Thanks to Nandrianina’s public display of righteous defiance, what began as a family quarrel quickly spread to the rest of the village, becoming an open clash between the sexes. Wives refused for the first times in their marriages to submit to their husbands’ wills. I was fourteen at the time, very much in love with Hery, a boy two years my senior who barely acknowledged my presence. Mialy’s and my hearts filled with dread as the conflict between the men and women of our clan raged out of control; husbands and wives competed as to who could utter the most hurtful deprecations, wives denied their husbands physical love, husbands struck faces they had hitherto adored, and we young people were pressed by our increasingly irrational elders to take sides according to what lay between our legs.

It ended in Schism. Nandrianina, still on crutches, petitioned the SchneerSons to officiate over the splitting up of our clan along the fault line of sex. I went forlornly and bitterly with the women into their new eruvnet, knowing I would likely never see Hery again, never grasp his hand in mine. I would never marry and start a family of my own, unless I abandoned my clan and succeeded in finding another eruvnet community willing to take me in. During the next three unhappy years, I often contemplated throwing my lot in with an alien community, one of the seventy thousand which I had heard resided within the City’s eight walls. But the more I contemplated this escape route, the more it came to seem like fleeing the drenching downpour of a rainstorm in the depths of the sea.

After all, how had there come to be seventy thousand subcommunities in our City? Surely there had not been seventy thousand different clans, seventy thousand different combinations of skin tone and nose shape and language and religion which had fled to these shores? From what I had learned at my school, there had been fewer than two hundred separate nations when the Wars of All Against All had begun, and most of those nations would have had fewer than a dozen self-segregating ethnic and religious groups within their borders. Twelve multiplied by two hundred only came to twenty-four hundred, not seventy thousand. So from whence had this immense expansion come in the century since? From endless Schisms, repeated and repeated like a piece of paper being folded in half, then in quarters, then again and again, ever smaller, stopping only when warring couples were Schismed into isolates which drifted invisibly through the City like specks of dust.

Why subject myself to more of the same? If I were so determined to leave my sundered clan, the only clan I had ever known, why not leave this heartbreaking City entirely? And so when I left, I made the big leaving. I leaped all the way to Mars, to Bradbury, to what seemed to my seventeen year-old self to be sanity.

Yet I never did find a man to fit me. I never did start a family of my own, despite fleeing headlong through eighty million kilometers of vacuum.

I am disguised as a man once more. Only this time, the disguise does not chafe me. I cannot permit Hery or my father or my uncles to see me. It would shatter their hearts, surely. Just as seeing them for the first time in nearly seventeen years, yet being unable to embrace them, will shake the foundations of my own heart. But this is my job, this is my burden; I knew in returning to the City I would risk this.

“Leah, let us wait a moment before going into the village.”

She glances at me with concern; her chiseled male features accentuate this. “Are you certain you want to talk with your kinsmen? I could pose to them the questions we’ve discussed. You don’t need to see them again, if it is too hard.”

“No, it is my responsibility... I just need a moment to... settle something in my mind. Then we can go.”

What I am trying to decide is whether to press the red button on my aid-suit’s left wrist. Whether to dissolve, for myself only, the invisible fence which segregates the men and women of my birth clan. For just a moment. They would not be together, yet they would be... if only in my eyes. Should I allow myself this glimpse of a paradise irretrievably lost to me? Will it be a gift to myself? Or will it be an exercise in self-flagellation?

Caught in my indecision, I peer around the corner I have sheltered behind. There is Lachlan Square. My childhood playground. Its library was my schoolhouse, its hall of justice my castle, its fountain my private lagoon. Sitting at the edge of the fountain, which is still centered around the green-hued merman I remember so well, he who holds his three-pronged trident above his wet curls, are a man... and a woman?

Have I already pressed the red button without realizing it? Yet I sense no weakness in my body, no palsy—

“Leah, tell me — is my eruvnet set for Anarako Arivo? Or have I fallen out of the Neuronet altogether?”

It is an absurd question. Looking down, my hands are still the heavily-veined hands of a man. Leah retains her dark Arabian beak (we Malagasy collected our features from many peoples we sojourned among). Yet — a Malagasy man and woman sitting together at the Lachlan Square fountain?

“There is nothing amiss, Nofy, nothing I can see on my tuning unit. Are the adjustments I made to your aid-suit making you ill—?”

A fantastical notion occurs to me. Fantastical, yet the only deduction which makes sense. “Leah, check this for me in your records if you can. Has Anarako Arivo been involved in a Merging during the past fourteen years?”

“Mergings are exceedingly rare...” My heart batters the bars of its bony cage while I wait for her to type in her search commands. “Hold on... why, yes. Yes. You’re right, Nofy. How did you know? Eleven years ago, Anarako Arivo and Nouveau Tamatave jointly opted for Merging.”

Nouveau Tamatave... the name Nandrianina and her followers chose for their new eruvnet seventeen years ago. The eruvnet I was dragged into by my mother and aunts, the truncated community I so reluctantly joined for three bitter years.

I was too impatient. Kala Ratsy, the headstrong, the impulsive. Merging. Reunion. My good Lord. Eleven years ago. Had I held out for just three more years...

“Nofy, we mustn’t miss our appointment with the clan’s headman. Are you coming? Or should I meet him on my own?”

“No... I will come...”

It is like walking at the bottom of the ocean, encased in one of those primitive deep-sea diving suits from the story books, my feet weighed down with thick soles of lead. Walking across Lachlan Square, I see faces which were once as familiar to me as my mother’s voice, older now by nearly a full generation. People with names I remember, laughs I remember, whose cooking I once tasted. They stare at me with open antipathy and even a hint of fear, as though I am a stranger, an outlander, someone who might wish them harm. Is this a dream? Did I never leave Bradbury? Do I lie entombed in sleep in my windowless apartment a hundred and twenty meters beneath the red dust of Mars?

The dream intensifies. It mocks me with my inability to awaken. The headman who awaits us in his office — it is Hery.

He is furious. I have never seen him so possessed by anger. Whatever outrage Ehmet Jian has committed against Anarako Arivo must be an abomination beyond measure.