Warp & Woof: Chapter Four
A science-fiction serial
Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.
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And now the fourth chapter:
Warp & Woof
Chapter Four:
Cтрелки
(The Strelki)
Svetlana / Warp
Within the little house’s covered porch, Svetlana held her son’s tiny hand and stared out at the fields as they rolled up in the distance and circled overhead. The fields narrowed into blackness in the east with the coming of night, and in the west, they burned with the setting of the sun; in that darkness, Oleg’s fleshy lips floated through space, drawing nearer and nearer until they encompassed the full circle of the horizon, with nothing left visible but the glistening of saliva upon his tongue like the twinkling of stars; he sucked in, and a mighty gale whipped through the farm and toppled her potted petunias. The far horizon burned bright and blew billowing clouds of smoke over the house.
Svetlana pulled every towel from its place, drenched them in the sink, and shoved them into the crack between every door and its threshold. The windows turned white, and her son’s sniffles became whimpering tears. She clutched him to her bosom and sang a lullaby passed down from the fathers.
Sleep, sweet son; another child, I’m birthing;
come name-day, mommy’s tummy will swell;
slumber, sweet son; at your funeral, I’m weeping;
buried with a fresh garden rose,
in dirt where nothing grows;
and they ring the great big bell.
Her tiny son wouldn’t sleep but with his father’s face, sucked upon her nipple and smoked her down to a trail of ash and one slight but glowing ember.
#
Warp waited, but for a long time, nothing happened. The silence of the room filled with all the background noises one learned to ignore aboard a ship, and then the pattern of his mom’s breathing quickened. She moaned softly like an engine warming up and sang, “Sleep, sweet son; another child, I’m birthing…”
Her voice carried more than a melody; with it came sorrow laced with fear. Warp heard it in the thinness of her voice and the way it caught in her throat.
The song itself felt familiar, as from memories beyond remembering. He imagined hearing it when he was just a baby, the words designed long ago to allay a mother’s fears, for what it ushered into the imagination, it warded off from reality. Terror sung sweetly to comfort mother and child, the child in its melody and the sound of mommy’s voice, and the mother in the paradoxical power of its lyrics.
#
Svetlana covered her face and called for her son. The ash glowed red and became an emergency light on a metallic wall. The light melted, popped, and went dark, and she covered her face against the heat and called again for her son.
Her husband’s voice answered, “This way my love.”
She coughed against flames that tickled her throat. “I’m not your love.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
She slumped to her knees but found no floor on which to land, only the ash and space into which she fell.
#
With Dr. Popov’s approval, Warp took his mother’s hand. She called his name in a choked and pleading voice and then in soft defiance cried, “I’m not your love!”
Warp looked to the doctor for rescue.
“Don’t assume you can interpret any meaning,” she said. “One sentence may have no connection to another in her mind.”
A tear streamed down his face. “Then why are we doing this?”
Popov wore a false smile that unsettled more than it comforted. “We’re timing her words to her brainwaves, but you’re here because this is your chance to talk. Whether or not she reacts in any recognizable way, there is a good possibility she will hear you.”
He pressed his mother’s hand to his tear-stained face.
“She can’t feel your touch,” Popov continued, “but she might hear your voice.”
He closed his eyes and trembled.
#
In the emptiness of space, nebulae of ash gave birth to stars, and out of that near void, her son’s voice cried: “Why are we doing this?”
Four Strelki traced the distance between stars, the third, shriveled and burnt, and Svetlana searched her heart for an answer: “Our ancestors chose this because they chose life.”
#
Warp gasped and let out a warbling cry. She’d answered; his mother had answered.
“Did you hear about Varp-i-Vol’?”
He covered his mouth, remembering the night they planned Dmitri’s invitation.
“That’s the future the generations since have chosen. They’ve abandoned us; they’ve abandoned hope,” she said in sputtering, halted phrases.
He remembered his response. Those remaining on earth had found immortality.
“They’re not eternal, my love,” she continued. “They’re dead. They died in the process of being copied, and it’s a copy that lives in the methane seas of Titan. If that’s immortality then Mikhail Bulgakov is immortal; his fame and honor as a novelist came only after death; he knows nothing of it. He knows nothing of our thoughts of him, as the dead of earth know nothing of the thoughts of their copies. They are less than remembered; they are replaced.”
Warp opened his mouth to answer, but Popov held him off, motioning for him to let her continue on her own. So, he waited.
“It’s suicide, and worse than suicide,” she said. “They’ve murdered the generations who were to follow but now will never be. That’s why we’ve come, my son, that we might continue.”
#
The Strelki drifted in a dark expanse that undulated and shimmered, less space than ocean. Svetlana floated with them in the unlit liquid, silent and questioning, but the liquidity was not a movement of atoms but of bits, a sea of information, a unity of data, a digital approximation of herself.
The Strelki were gone and had never been, nothing more than projections of her desire—manifestations of quantum imaginations—and she was back among all that remained of humanity and all it would ever be. She was the memory of someone who’d once been Svetlana Tereshkova, a woman who had dreamed of escaping to the stars, of forging a new destiny for humanity, of having a child. Instead, her copy had been deposited here, in a giant computer cooled within the seas. Humanity could live out any dream it wished, but a dream was all it would ever be. They were saturnine copies within a Saturnian moon.
Voiceless, formless, her mind a self-aware conglomeration of facts: Svetlana screamed, a virtual heart torn with grief over things that would never be, for anyone, ever again.
“You were real,” she whispered. “You were my son, and I loved you.”
That imagined son appeared before her, in the apartment they’d shared after his father left. The son’s name was Oleg, and most of all he loved animals; intelligent creatures who were born and aged, gave birth, and died, passing on their information to the generations to come, not hoarding it unto themselves in some pretense of immortality. His friends had called him Warp, after this very program, and he had hated it.
She wept out of a deep and digital agony. He’d hated the name because she’d hated the program; she regretted the choice she’d made and that all of humanity had made with her. In life, the stars had proved unattainable, space expanding beyond their reach. Only here, in the dark, she could dream; here, humanity could explore, and new planets swept by grassy fields awaited the touch of her son’s feet, planets where all Earth’s children could have a future, where aging parents could be laid to rest, and where life had both a future and an end.
—Thaddeus Thomas
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