Disorder
An excerpt from today's writing.
Last
night, the guard returned to my cell.
In fact, there were three
of them. All masked and dressed in those rotting, moldy robes. One
replaced the great clam shell, one searched my room and the other
placed a stack of papers on my desk.
Two of them left, and one
remained. It indicated that I should sit, and then it stood behind
me, clicking and chattering.
I looked at the papers. It was my
writing. But it wasn’t what I had written.
The great clam
shell spoke in its flat, empty voice. “There is confusion in your
narrative.” The carved ivory device was translating the clicks and clacks of the guard.
The breathy, percussive sounds that issued from beneath the mask were
speech of a kind I had never heard before.
But such details
barely registered at the time. I just sat at the desk and stared at
the story, feeling the walls pressing tighter around me. Never had I
been so aware of the suffocating reality of my imprisonment.
My text had been converted into their language by the magic of the clam
shell, and then changed back for me to read. This was the tale that I had spent so
long narrating, and it was almost unrecognizable to me.
“Elements
of your text indicate male and female members of your species. But we
believe you have assigned the wrong genders. Descriptions of your
biology and social formation suggest you are unaware of the real
order of life.” The thing spoke but I was hardly listening.
It
was indeed true that they had switched around the genders in my tale.
All those who had been men, were now women. And turnabout true as
well. Including myself. “He” became “she” and “she”
became “he”.
Mother was now father, and sister had become
brother.
But that wasn’t all that had changed.
Much of the lengthy social commentary and translator’s notes I had written were gone. Excised by an unseen editor. In their place was a dry account of events that read like the world’s most uninteresting history book.
A degree of cultural transliteration had taken
place too. A house became a nest. A family became a brood. Mouths
became mandibles. The forest became the ocean. Birds became fish and
the Culture became the Mother Nest.
In a few pages, it was
possible for me to understand more of my captors than they obviously
understood about me.
Clack, crrrick! “You will continue your narrative. You will stick to the terms outlined in this sample. You will not deviate from the truth.” Click, click, clack, crunch.
Rustle, hiss.
“The
truth?” I asked. The pages before me grew unfocused. I lacked the
will to bring them back to my attention.
The jailer’s musk
intensified as it leaned close to me. A scaly claw closed on my
shoulder. “The world is as it is. Every brood mate knows how the
world works and the proper order of things. This tale is disorder. It
is lies and fantasy.”
I gestured to myself. “Fantasy? Look
at me. Am I a lie? Is this body an untruth?”
“The wheel
turns a final time. When it has crushed all untruths, only the truth
will be preserved. Our eggs are planted deep, and long after we are
gone they will awake in a new world, without the disorder of the
past.”
The jailer turned and knocked on the door. It was
opened and the beast left, taking its odor with it.
I stared at the sample they had left. I felt hollow, like my guts
had just dropped out on the floor.
Never had I felt more kinship
with that poor tugaan; the accursed Daanzolnam.
Just
as he was damned by the gods to spend every day trying to build a
tower upon the sucking earth of a stinking bog, I was destined to
spend my efforts for nothing. Every word and sentence I had put
forward was slipping beneath the surface of the swampy ground, to
leave no trace of the world that I had lived in. No real account of those who lived and
died and trusted in me to carry their legacy forward.
If I had
managed to imagine myself happy before, now any illusions were
banished.
But I had no choice. I would write on, while I thought
of what I might do about this intolerable situation. Maybe something
would present itself.
My sister would have made an opportunity
appear. She would have demanded, and probably received, a different
fate than the goddess offered her. But she wasn’t here.
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