We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (26 page)

The virus-dreams have reached childhood.

Sunday and they dress you for church, in ribbons and little-girl frock, all pastels. Temples are flattened to grainy pictures and stained postcards trampled underfoot, peeking out over the fraying edges of carpeting, hiding under calendars that tell the year in
Anno Domini
. Five hundred and forty-three behind the real one.

Among the pews you huddle as the man in black gives sermon, his voice the beehive chorus of the nano-missionaries. You squeeze your hand into the child’s fingers and pinch her cross until it bleeds onto the marble, spotting her tiny footsteps red. When no one is looking you break the cross into two, then four. When no one is looking you use a little marker to scribble Thai onto signs when you can, even if it doesn’t take on surface that’s gloss and metal, even if the marker is too faint. You wear the tip to a dry nub even so.

Under the not-mother’s absent gaze you cut a green mango to slices, mix your own chili salt, and eat it in place of pudding and peanut-butter sandwich. These gestures do nothing. You know that. But it comforts you to spend these grains of freedom you’ve sieved like gold out of the muck, and you miss the taste nearly as strongly as you miss the dead.

The end is soon. It’ll be the end for you, too.

Security tautens and loosens in these last days according to the pitch of collective nerves. She ascertains that she’s in a ruined hospital in Palangkaraya, basement level, far from home. It chills her until she remembers the distance is irrelevant, that come success or failure she will never leave this place. What remains of her will not survive being disconnected from the tank.

All is anatta. Sangkarn is transient. She needs to let go. Panic rises anyway, even though she’s so detached from flesh that she should be beyond this choking terror, above this mindless fear of the grave.

Eavesdropping on them calms her in stages. The farangs are happy to be done, happy to—soon—be home. The shattered city unsettles them and, fingers tight over their crosses, they joke about Indonesian boogeymen, le-ak flitting at night with entrails streaming like tassels on a kite. They discuss taking Jakarta, one more strategic gain against China. China, China. The word preoccupies them the way oxygen preoccupies lungs; the rest is peripheral, mattering insofar as to how it might provide advantage in the coming war. There will be one. They intend to press the issue. They will regain their pride.

She unpacks the trojan as they watch the cinematography they’ve made of her life, the disease they’ve made of her puppet-self.

I am.

A leap from the precipice of metal and flesh, a weightless somersault in free fall and you’re inside. Impactless you land on your feet. Ghosts don’t make splashes and you orient without having to try. This is what happens when they hold the door wide and invite you in.

There are nodes where they’ve latched parasitic to Krungthep’s dream-grid and you know every one, for each link was made through your brain. You carry a schematic on your forearms, on the inside of your elbows, the way patients carry injection scars.

In churches you turn altar cloths from cream to red, the color of blood and nation. In Baiyoke Tower, you change the locks on doors and wedge elevators open. You pull keys out of your mouth and leave them in particular cars, and in schools you replace the language of textbooks. At construction sites you push with a fingertip and scaffolds crumble, wreathing you in cement dust. You visit certain embassies and edit the flags and emblems, minute tricks. Symbols are all there is to the mesh.

While your puppet-self fulfills her part you wander Krungthep one last time, exerting the sinews of memory. A chedi’s curve, the green spikes of a durian at market, half of Pridi Panomyong’s face from the monument at your campus. The pieces of city their programs have rubbed out.

The launch wrenches at you, for you are everything—disease and vector—and it almost sweeps you away, shattering you in pieces and distributing them across the grid: that will complete the infection, finalize the murder.

Traffic has always been potentially two-way. They had to leave it so to operate and manipulate you. Now you tear that path into a wound, and what flies free is not their erasing of Krungthep, their unraveling of the dream-grid. It is their future laid bare. A hemorrhage of classified data and logistics, maps of where they’re strong and where they’re weak—the weapons they have, the weapons they don’t have; what survives of their country and what does not. There will be no war for them to win.

They shut everything down: too late. That opening was all anyone needed, and at the other end there are waiting hands on machines which reel in and gather the data you’ve unspooled. Data that can be used to keep Krungthep alive. Data that can be sold, for that’s the game everyone must play, now.

You imagine farang men yanking out cords, slamming down on circuit breakers with fists suddenly sweat-wet. You imagine them howling, animal panic.

The casket opens; the liquids buoying you pour out in a briny flood and the puppet of your skin sags on knees that no longer work. They tear it out, to end your dreams of home and bring you death.

There is light, and you laugh.

Forests of the Night

Gabriel Murray

“I’ve always thought there was something quintessentially Oriental,” said the Captain’s friend Burroughs, “about the tiger. Don’t you think, Captain?”

The Captain loved to hunt, so when Burroughs had come to him that morning, claiming that his tenant’s sheep were being taken by a beast, he saddled up and took out the dogs without being asked twice. He didn’t ask me along; he didn’t have to. I was the one doing the saddling.

I wondered if Mr Burroughs remembered that I was present. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. He only seemed to ever ascribe to me a very select quality of presence, whether or not I was actually there at the time, and it didn’t involve considering his words by how I might take them.
Mr
Burroughs doesn’t mean ill
, the Captain had explained to me once with a clap on the shoulder and a flash of toothy white.
He’s a bit of a berk, though, and you should know that. Good to know which of one’s friends are berks.
The Captain regarded many of his friends with a certain fond contempt; I came to understand that this was a matter of course when it came to having friends from public school.

Today the Captain was indulging Burroughs less than usual. The dogs had promptly set to howling, so he was distracted. “I suppose it comes from the Orient, yes,” he said with a shrug that indicated he wasn’t paying attention, “in that limestone doesn’t pop out of the ground here either, so you could call it quintessentially Kentish if you liked.”

I hid my amusement at the conversation by leaning down to pat my favourite wolfhound on the head. The Captain had stern words on the matter of giving the hunting dogs attention when they were failing—spoiling a lesser creature just confuses it, he said—but he wasn’t looking.

Burroughs wasn’t finished, though: “So much beauty—yet really just a big brute, a big dumb brute. And beautiful and wild and incomprehensible. But deadly, if you forge in without knowing what you’re after. Very Oriental, I find. I saw a man-eater in a cage in Ceylon, but all I wanted to do was reach out and touch it.”

“It’s a cat,” said the Captain, glancing up at both of us. He’d dismounted to see if anything had startled the dogs, to terrify them so. He was perfectly without motion when he stood still, possessed of not a single nervous habit. His thumb was hooked into his belt and his jodhpurs were still pressed. “Beautiful, perhaps, but it’s a bloody great cat. And I am nearly one hundred percent certain that no travelling circuses have come through Yorkshire of late, and that none of our neighbours are madmen with penchants for zoo-keeping, so I don’t honestly know what you’re on about, Burroughs. We’re looking for a hungry wolf. Maybe rabid, so I think we should keep the dogs at home. Perhaps that’s what they’re smelling, do you think, Jack?”

“They’ve a nose for sickness, sir,” I answered neutrally and straightened up in the saddle.

“Perhaps. I saw a paw-print,” said Burroughs with the airy stubbornness of an aristocrat.

The Captain smiled without sincerity, as if to say, there’s Burroughs being daft again. But he was a gentleman, as he was teaching me to be, so he nodded. “I’m sure you did. I’ll keep looking,” he said, mounting again and bringing his horse about. “Jack, let’s take the dogs home.”

I nodded my assent and clapped my hands for their attention, but I was uneasy. Burroughs was a berk, you’d get no argument from me there. There was, however, at least one thing in the world upon which Mr Burroughs and I agreed: in the blood and wool and loamy heath we’d seen the impression of a great cat’s paw. But the Captain was a man of Reason, and reasonable men did not see what plainly couldn’t be there.

Leave off, Burroughs
, I could’ve told him.
You won’t convince him that way
. But Burroughs never would have listened to me anyway.

We rode home.

My mother let me go right away when the Captain came back for me in Kuala Lumpur, which I can’t help but resent slightly. It wasn’t as though I hated the idea of going with him, either. She may not know it, but I understand her there. No one met Captain Lyons and didn’t want to go with him.

When I met him the first time I was struck by how quiet he could be, how self-assured. I knew British men as red-faced braggarts, often with wandering hands, and had never formed a favourable impression. Jonathan Lyons, by contrast, was tall and copper-haired and aquiline, with touches of silver at his temples. My mother and he regarded one another for some time at the door, and then he doffed his hat and she invited him in.

Still, I might have appreciated some weeping and wailing. But my mother hadn’t been raised to weep or wail and neither had I. “This is the boy?” was the Captain’s question.

“Yes,” she said with her hand on my back. “Named after his father.”

I certainly wasn’t, but I was now, I supposed. I stood up straight and prepared for hawkish scrutiny, but instead I was regarded by those steady copper eyes without tension. It was strangely discomforting. I had the impression he blinked as a courtesy. “I’ll call him Jack,” he said. “Does he have his letters? And some schooling?”

“Of course,” she said coolly. “We do have schools here.”

He walked a half-circle around me for more inspection, then stepped back, visibly relieved. Perhaps he hoped to ascertain that I was really his son. He had nothing to worry about there. From the moment he stepped through the door I knew that he was my missing piece, the stranger I didn’t recognize in my face when I looked in the mirror. “I can’t acknowledge him,” he said. “He’ll have to call me Captain Lyons.”

She bristled. “Then why—”

“I will send him to university,” he said, crossing his arms. “He’ll want for nothing that a common English boy with sponsorship would have. But he will have to be my valet until then. There is no other option.”

When we parted he kissed my mother on the cheek. “
Selamat tinggal
,” he said in very precise Malay.

The irony was that I’d far more preparation to go to university than to be a valet, and maybe he knew that, too. I should have been angry. I was sort of angry later, once I thought about it. It didn’t matter. I was too taken with him and his bearing, the way he spoke and the copper in his hair. He was so poised, so indifferent, that little glimpses of his approval were like flashes of gold. Already I wanted him to like me.

One disembowelled sheep was a waste of wool, but not really the Captain’s concern. Two were gruesome, but still a favour he was doing for an old mate. A horse, however—

“You see it! You see! Its neck is broken,” Burroughs nearly howled in the late morning when the Captain answered the summons with me in tow again, “and teeth wouldn’t snap it so clean, something
smacked
it, Lyons, with its paw. A wolf doesn’t hunt like that, it goes for the jugular. This is a cat. Do you really think a lone wolf could kill a horse? One of
my
thoroughbreds?”

I was groggy and wanted to leave. I didn’t care about Burroughs’ livestock or his madcap theories on what was killing them. His talk of the Orient had driven me to uncomfortable dreams, where I loped around the Captain’s Yorkshire estate on four massive feet and thought idly about getting something to eat. It was Hell on my sleep and made me nervous of how useful I was being at any given moment. I really hated Burroughs then, I didn’t want him to utter another word about
the Orient
and remind the Captain about me, not when things were going so well between us.

“I know what your theory is, Burroughs,” said the Captain with a weary brush of his fingers across his forehead.

“You’ve come recently from the Orient—” Burroughs glanced at me; I shrank. “Do you think perhaps—”

“
Burroughs
,” the Captain said sharply. “I’ll tell you if I find anything.”

The dogs were still inconsolable. They were useless for proper hunting, too: the Captain and I had taken them for a boar hunt at another school friend’s well-stocked estate, but when I brought them in they barked at each other and the air and then bolted in the thick of it, spooking the Captain’s horse. He was thrown, but he landed on his feet with his lance in his hand and he waited for the pig to charge him.

I didn’t even have time to be afraid for him. He was like how I imagined Lord Wellington from the Waterloo histories; he just pulled the lance out of the pig when it stopped thrashing and said, “My handkerchief, Jack.”

His friends were crowing about “Lord!” and “now
that
is a hunter!” but I worried for the dogs. This was the sort of uselessness that couldn’t be sanctioned in hounds.

“I will have to think about putting them down,” muttered the Captain, much more ruffled by the dogs’ behaviour than by his close scrape with the boar’s tusks. That didn’t seem to concern him at all. And why would it? There was a Cape buffalo’s skin in his game room, elephants’ tusks too. “No, I’ll speak to the veterinarian first. Perhaps they
are
sick.”