Celebrant (13 page)

The city’s food is grown in plots outside the walls.
The vegetable rows are divided by lattices of clear glass;
each field has a large bulbous timer, like an old-fashioned onion pocketwatch, buried in its center, and the farms buzz with their hollow ticking.
Fertile fields hum like looms, the plots are surrounded by closely-spaced metal shells like fanlights wired to the timers and to batteries of neutral energy from the city factory.
At intervals, they charge, flooding with trembling rags of wan current that growl against the metal like the razz of an arclight.
Invisible elementals saturate the ground, cracking seeds open with eardrum hammers, tugging at and stretching the leaves, lengthening the shoots, inflating the vegetables like balloons, working to raise stalks of grain like drawbridges
...
Or these are the things one imagines, watching all the plants quietly shimmying, boogie-ing to and fro in the ground like dancers making the round of the dance floor.
Various measures are taken to keep the rabbit girls and the big blue deer the Indians call nilgai from getting at this food and for the most part they work.

Joining rabbit girls involves stealing at least three oranges right off the trees.
This is risky.
The oranges are watched, but only when they’re ripe.
So the girls steal unripened oranges, and even then there are watchmen to be avoided.
These oranges are grown with the fertilizing assistance of the manurancers, manufactured at the city factory;
the manurancing energy dissipates when they are fully ripe, but the underripe fruit will not yet have converted all its charge.
This, transferred to the eater, causes the ears and nails to lengthen, the incisors to become more prominent, the back to become hinged, the corners of the eyes to alter their pitch, opening diagonally on an extended field of peripheral vision.
Hence, rabbit girls.

They live by theft.
If there’s trouble, rabbit girls disappear through basement windows and into culverts.
The celestials don’t police the city, but once in a while they are directed by their minders to pursue rabbit girls who steal things in the vicinity of the factory.
Once, when a minder officiously told her to step back from the factory wall, Kunty threw a lump of donkeyshit at him and had to flee from a celestial.
In short bursts of wild effort she can reach twenty-seven kilometers an hour, becoming briefly the fastest-moving thing in the city.
Kunty knows from this experience that the celestials have a limited ability to pass through solid objects, so anyone who thinks they can elude them by adopting a zig-zag path, and thus interposing obstacles to pursuit, is only hastening his capture.
It’s the flight in a straight line that confounds them.
And they can’t run on all fours like rabbit girls can, so with the speed of their arms and legs combined, rabbit girls can outrun the celestials.

These are the girls who survive exposure and come in from outer space, as the area around the metronome is called.
They trickle into holy-shaman-city-Votu because salvation, of a sort, is possible here.
Some float in attached to balloons, others bubble up in the springs, or wander in off the steppe.
Thanks to Whrounim taxes, there is a shortage of boys and consequently no gangs of boys to worry about.
People who live in Votu have enough to go around, and murder and rape are rare occurrences.
While it is interpreted in a variety of ways, the presence of the girls appears always in the light of some kind of blessing, as if they were mascots, totem spirits, good luck.
Severest penalties are incurred by doing the least injury to any of them, or so it is said.
They fulfill the role of necessary recipients of alms, and are typically left to their own devices.

Some manage to find homes.
Some become rabbit girls.
Others
...
These are unshockable
—
gone in an instant, in a flurry of motion.
They have displaced Votu’s actual pigeons, as rabbit girls have displaced all the rabbits.
Squirrels still can be seen elbowing along the whistling pipes and cables;
there are no squirrel girls or not yet, or not any more.

...
Pigeon girls, whose white droppings streak the sides of the buildings and eat into the concrete.
They dress in grey rags and shawls and “tardoleos,” which is what they call leotards.
Their blank, staring, dark-eyed faces, many of them the eyes almost completely dark, seemingly oblivious to cold, to anything but hunger.

They sleep in shifts, huddled on their bottoms with their heads behind their knees, like crenellations along the roof tops, while others keep watch impassively.
In the streets they mill in circles, murmuring to themselves, scratching at the ground, and it’s impossible to tell one from another.
At any abrupt movement toward them they burst out rustling, and vanish.

Silent, watchful, nervous, staring, but without a pigeon’s hollow inexpressiveness.
Even a chicken is capable of some show of distress, but a pigeon, like an insect, has nothing but velocity to speak with;
in a panic, the pigeon’s face is as blank and stupid as it is in repose.
They look at every thing in the world with hapless alarm, a
startled eye
—
What?
What?
The girls bend at the waist darting out a hand to the ground in an approximation of pecking the earth, to pluck up a coin or a raisin or a bit of string, sometimes a little mob of them all darting and picking at once in a spot where rubbish has been discarded.

These musty little girls have the same fits of abrupt scratching; and turn in unison to stare fixedly at any alarming thing with the same flick of the head;
the same dipping bow of head in greeting another who comes to sit down;
the same sameness that makes one like another;
the same way of being there for so long and then gone.
But they also turn their heads with imperial slowness more like an eagle’s, and they can play together, when they feel safe enough, with hard-won gaiety.
There they are, sitting spaced out on the edge of a roof, picking their noses.
Like rabbit girls, they don’t eat meat, and get their food by theft, snatching life a morsel at a time from carts, refuse heaps, the ground.

*

Rabbit girls fountain up over the open top of the cart snatching cabbages and carrots and dashing off with their spoils between their teeth.

They congregate in back of the stores, where a number of alleyways meet;
crawling in and out of basement windows and along the ground, chattering in small groups and climb all over each other giggling.

Kunty wears a dirty, faded dress of indifferent color with shoulder straps, the shredded skirt hanging in long strips from her waist.
She’s lolling on the broad side of an overturned barrel, her head lying on her outstretched arm, while with the other she absently scrapes designs into the wood with her nails.
A few other girls trickle in from a drain pipe.

There’s pigeon girls over by the park (a newcomer says, apropos of nothing)

Those girls are inappropriate (Kunty says)
Those girls are im
plau
sible.

She rubs her bottom pensively.

Those girls are igno
ra
muses (she says)

One girl with huge black irises, sitting nearby, says:
They’re just plain stupid.

This is Ester, who cleaves to Kunty, praising and flattering.

*

A naked rabbit girl slides out of an alleyway wide-eyed
—
Hey!
Pigeons’re stealing our tomatoes!

Kunty rears up, shaking herself vigorously, then streaks past the girl with a whuff of air.

A few streets away a grey girl with a beak drawn on her face in flaking silver paste brazenly steals a can of sardines in plain view of the vendor, inside his store.
In the few moments he wastes chasing her down the street, pigeon girls spiral by the stalls in front of his shop swiping at a heap of tomatoes under a tarp.

They rendezvous with their spoils in a tiny lot where two brick buildings angle apart.
Murmurs, smell of tomatoes.

Kunty erupts among them like a cannonball;
they scatter.
Some can feel the clout like breath, and hear the low whipping sound her hands make as she slashes just short of their fleeing backs and legs.
They leap up to the eaves or bound through the windows to escape her, she raking with her nails a few of the slower and less fortunate, who cry out.
Darting this and that way, attacking at will any who are near, excited to fury, Kunty suddenly pounces on a light-haired girl in dirty grey leotard, knocking her on her back and coming down on top of her.

The girl holds off Kunty’s claws, hands and feet, with both her hands and legs.
Kunty’s face lunges out of her mop of hair and snaps, straining forward to bite.
The strength of the girl underneath ebbs, her limbs slacken jerkily
—
then she rams Kunty in the gut with one knee, and releasing Kunty’s arms, slams her across the face with her open hand, knocking Kunty aside, slip out from under her.
Kunty is surprised, but she ripostes at once, lunging forward to be met by another crack across the face in exactly the same spot as the first and so quickly she can’t see it coming.
With a shout she swings toward the movement and is struck twice more, slaps in the face with a little hand so fierce that it twists her head
—
see stars.
There’s the other girl winding up, the light behind her
—
moving first she shoots forward nails out and that hand bangs her down, once again hitting her precisely in the same place.
Kunty staggers a little and the other lifts her two hands and claps Kunty’s ears between them with a splat.
Kunty’s legs jerk and she jumps back with a loud cry, holding her sensitive ears.
She buckles back onto her ass, then pivots and scrambles away, stops about halfway down the alley, still rubbing her ears, hissing with pain and confusion.

Run Burn!
(a window shouts)

and, after a moment’s hesitation, looking after Kunty whose gasping is already reverting to snarls of rage, the girl in the grey leotard bounds up the wall and away.

Still wobbly, Kunty rushes back, crouches, and jumps up the wall.
Hanging by her hands
—
she sees they’re gone.

*

Pigeon girls gather on a pitched roof top, squat down huddled with their backs to the wind, all keeping fairly close to a warm chimney.
The news travelled rapidly among them
—

Burn beat up Kunty!

The exclamation in each case followed at once by
—

Which one is Burn?

She goes by that name, having no other, and no one to name her.
She’d just slipped in among them some day, from the upper city, from the other side of the boundary.

Gathered around, pigeon girls quietly ask her, with pointing hands, again and again, to show them how she did it.
Patiently, Burn re-enacts the fight with scrupulous exactness, a series of postures without rage fear or the flaring excitement already becoming a dance, conjures the phantom of Kunty in the hollows of her own body’s motions, every time striking the same mark in the air with her hand.