Letters from Novosibirsk Read online
Page 9
of the North American tundra shimmered next in liquid ice-blue, grays, and yellow. Parallel canals, box buildings, and circular storage stations appeared in red outline, overlaying the landscape.
Improved design for the North American Federation’s tundra-farming enterprise, now in its twelfth year. Warmer arctic summers have allowed an 88% increase in yield of parsnips, lettuce, cucumbers, and snow pea crops. Experiments are now underway to encourage the growth of frost-immune yellow tomatoes, the AVF-92-SE hybrid developed by the International Siberian Cooperative #241.
A blizzard obliterated the tundra scene; a man’s nose then replaced it…
“Nice touch,” Wynnet mumbled.
“But what…” Omar repeated.
Wynnet turned to look at him, sharply, as a parrot would.
“I said ‘Nice touch’—the blizzard, that is.”
“What is this?” Omar resolved to say.
“Looks like a nose.”
“No, I mean…”
Rhinoplasty’s latest gold medal winner. Subject Tibeto-Turko-Irish, suffered from asymmetry and foreshortening. Correction performed in Caracas, with all ethnic members of subject’s family present for template generation and morphology verification…
The filly flashed again, and then an elderly woman climbing a dirt path: she had a crooked, flat nose and few teeth.
“Excuse me, Mr. Lee, but why are we watching this?”
Wynnet’s stare lengthened. A few moments passed before he spoke:
“It is the purest purveyor of relevant Earthly information we have.”
Omar had to reflect another moment, while Wynnet regained his stare.
What about each other?
“Pardon me?” Wynnet thought, but he could not ask. He was still too engrossed in his childhood, and could not imagine why his favorite horse and Kentuckian great-aunt should have flashed in his mind.
But the voice from the holograms continued, without interruption, just as it has been programmed to do:
Private entertainment insurance company I.T. has broken private insurance rate records, surpassing health, life, transplantation, spousal, education, and mental stability rates during the past nine weeks to become humankind’s most needed commodity. One in every five consumers world-wide can now expect to be entertained by prescribed means at regularly-appointed times during the life-week.
“I should pick some up,” said Wynnet.
“I think I’ll be running along now,” Omar returned.
Wynnet would not budge.
“Wait. Seven and a half more minutes. Almost assuredly something you need to know will be coming up.”
“Yes. Perhaps. But I haven’t finished Antarctica yet. My pens are drying. And by the way. Wynnet?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d like to talk to you again sometime.”
“About what?”
“About what? About some—I’m not exactly sure what. But there is something I need to talk about.”
“Anytime from 10:30 to 11:16, or from 3:00 to 3:22, or from 8 to 9:05. Bye Omar nice to meet you see you soon good night.”
“Good afternoon.”
Omar let the door slam; he was still not used to Novosibirsk’s petrified wooden doors, the heaviness by which they fell in the deepest direction of their lopsided cottages.
Wynnet remained seated before the coffee table where his hologram mail had just expired. He vaguely recalled a short piece about density levels of the latest molded polyglass breakfast tables, and the weekly worldwide roach count (W2RC), but another image had leveled him out for the rest of the afternoon. He neither prepared dinner at the appointed time nor released the latest incoming data into the System. Small red and green lights flashed all about him, defining the area of his living and working space. For the first time since his arrival at Novosibirsk, they were out of sync. Wynnet had been most nastily reminded of his first wet dream: a fact so neatly tucked away in his latent memory that he had little feeling left for it. But the incident brought a forgotten element back into his life: chaos. He, Wynnet Lee, had also suffered from not having total control of his penis.
And as he sat uncomfortably in his ragged chair, Nura gently stroked it into posture again. Nothing he had figured from his boyhood until now had made any difference. He must endure this uncalculated event with the strength of (he could never have thought of this alone) that boyhood.
11.
Karyne did not wear an apron when she cooked (too confining), and she was very careful not to use flour milled from Alaskan wheat (too many pesticides). But she would use thirty of the forty-two grains called for in her “World Cuisine” recipe for breakfast muffins, which she baked three or four times, weekly, for herself.
This morning, as the muffins baked, she took a quick stroll about her herb garden, and when she returned the familiar aroma hung peacefully about the kitchen, reminding her of days when things were less complicated, and life was effortless. She pulled the hot tray from the oven rack and set it on the stove to cool. Then she kicked off her sandals (also too confining) to make the morning’s tea selection.
In another few minutes she took a sip from the ginseng and gingerroot blend she had steeped and removed a steaming muffin from one of the circular holes in the tray. Stopping by her small refrigerator for the yak butter, she finally sat at table, and froze.
A map had grown into the wood grain of the tabletop.
She had never seen it there before: a peculiar light from the adjacent window emphasized strange arrows, irregular polygons, subtle changes in the wood’s color. Karyne pushed the muffin aside, deep into what appeared to be a vast sea, while the tea steamed in the middle of a nearly circular continent. She looked into the center of that continent; it grew white, full of ice, snow—and sand.
But the sand, as she was drawn more deeply into it, was not pure. It was full of little ridges, black troughs, and crossroads. And soon she discovered, very faintly etched across dunes, the letters O, M, A, R.
This actually sent a chill down her rigid body, of the kind she hadn’t had in years. What could these letters mean?
Probably nothing. Nothing, that is, that might be of any consequence to anybody. But there, just under the peninsula that shielded a bay, was a woman’s face.
She wore a veil: neither white nor black, but of a color that shimmered like the tinted waves flowing over her. Her eyes were the color of trees, their pupils like chasms in eroded rock. A dark wave of hair brushed over her forehead like a cloud expanding over the horizon. As Karyne tilted her head and found new angles from which to see her, the woman flickered in and out of Karyne’s sight. Finally she was altogether lost. Karyne fell back against her chair and exhaled. Who had taken so much care with this design? Why?
An ice-capped promontory sparkled at her from under the shadow of the napkin holder. As she leaned closer again she began to feel despair, though she knew not why. The sparkles became more brilliant, joyously flashing over the pointed ice. And then, as if at the end of a sunset, the flashes almost disappeared, leaving sharp hilltops and chiseled edges where the ice had met violent water. Karyne felt an immense sadness now. She felt as if she had had a vision, and that it had tugged her in every emotional direction: as if she had just seen and felt another’s soul.
To her left now, at a corner of the table that lay just under the window, was a wide, white plain. But again, the longer she looked the more she could make out patterns in the white: gently curving lines, lines intersecting, compact rectangles and squares bordering the lines. What she saw was a map of Vydrino, spread right over the flattest part of the frozen continent.
“Novosibirsk!” she whispered.
She looked up, and out the window. The light had changed again. The first snowflakes she had seen in a long time were falling; behind them the sky was heavily white. The grain in the table no longer suggested anything to Karyne. It was an ancient table, full of oil stains, nicks, and chips. She had never even bothered to wash it.
Later in the day she took a walk. The August sun broke out again, showering the old village with new light. Karyne felt she knew Novosibirsk better now: the image of the town’s map, so completely and barely laid out for her on the kitchen table, had stayed with her.
But soon it was replaced with thoughts of her afternoon’s work. (Every day of hers was categorized into three parts: morning, afternoon, and evening; with three quests to fulfill, three blocks of time to spend doing research, writing essays, or reading correspondence.) The idea of taking a walk with no purpose was utterly unknown to Karyne.
This afternoon (it had been planned for a week) was to be spent editing a distant colleague’s writing for improper innuendos and wasteful subtleties, as well as old-style grammatical constructions that might be offensive to children and anyone who did not have command of the language. But first she must visit the supply store to get paper for her antiquated Script Communication Device (the newer SCDs used only voice). It would be a short walk, if walk she must during this previously allotted editing time. She decided to cut through a backyard, why not, in order to get to the supply store sooner.
This backyard was even more unkempt than hers: tall Siberian grasses drying under the sun, a few scattered piles of firewood housing hornets and mushroom groves, a compost box breaking open, and an abandoned birdhouse dangling from one nail on a post. Karyne wondered if the yard had been left unattended for a hundred years, its last keepers driven away by one of
Improved design for the North American Federation’s tundra-farming enterprise, now in its twelfth year. Warmer arctic summers have allowed an 88% increase in yield of parsnips, lettuce, cucumbers, and snow pea crops. Experiments are now underway to encourage the growth of frost-immune yellow tomatoes, the AVF-92-SE hybrid developed by the International Siberian Cooperative #241.
A blizzard obliterated the tundra scene; a man’s nose then replaced it…
“Nice touch,” Wynnet mumbled.
“But what…” Omar repeated.
Wynnet turned to look at him, sharply, as a parrot would.
“I said ‘Nice touch’—the blizzard, that is.”
“What is this?” Omar resolved to say.
“Looks like a nose.”
“No, I mean…”
Rhinoplasty’s latest gold medal winner. Subject Tibeto-Turko-Irish, suffered from asymmetry and foreshortening. Correction performed in Caracas, with all ethnic members of subject’s family present for template generation and morphology verification…
The filly flashed again, and then an elderly woman climbing a dirt path: she had a crooked, flat nose and few teeth.
“Excuse me, Mr. Lee, but why are we watching this?”
Wynnet’s stare lengthened. A few moments passed before he spoke:
“It is the purest purveyor of relevant Earthly information we have.”
Omar had to reflect another moment, while Wynnet regained his stare.
What about each other?
“Pardon me?” Wynnet thought, but he could not ask. He was still too engrossed in his childhood, and could not imagine why his favorite horse and Kentuckian great-aunt should have flashed in his mind.
But the voice from the holograms continued, without interruption, just as it has been programmed to do:
Private entertainment insurance company I.T. has broken private insurance rate records, surpassing health, life, transplantation, spousal, education, and mental stability rates during the past nine weeks to become humankind’s most needed commodity. One in every five consumers world-wide can now expect to be entertained by prescribed means at regularly-appointed times during the life-week.
“I should pick some up,” said Wynnet.
“I think I’ll be running along now,” Omar returned.
Wynnet would not budge.
“Wait. Seven and a half more minutes. Almost assuredly something you need to know will be coming up.”
“Yes. Perhaps. But I haven’t finished Antarctica yet. My pens are drying. And by the way. Wynnet?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d like to talk to you again sometime.”
“About what?”
“About what? About some—I’m not exactly sure what. But there is something I need to talk about.”
“Anytime from 10:30 to 11:16, or from 3:00 to 3:22, or from 8 to 9:05. Bye Omar nice to meet you see you soon good night.”
“Good afternoon.”
Omar let the door slam; he was still not used to Novosibirsk’s petrified wooden doors, the heaviness by which they fell in the deepest direction of their lopsided cottages.
Wynnet remained seated before the coffee table where his hologram mail had just expired. He vaguely recalled a short piece about density levels of the latest molded polyglass breakfast tables, and the weekly worldwide roach count (W2RC), but another image had leveled him out for the rest of the afternoon. He neither prepared dinner at the appointed time nor released the latest incoming data into the System. Small red and green lights flashed all about him, defining the area of his living and working space. For the first time since his arrival at Novosibirsk, they were out of sync. Wynnet had been most nastily reminded of his first wet dream: a fact so neatly tucked away in his latent memory that he had little feeling left for it. But the incident brought a forgotten element back into his life: chaos. He, Wynnet Lee, had also suffered from not having total control of his penis.
And as he sat uncomfortably in his ragged chair, Nura gently stroked it into posture again. Nothing he had figured from his boyhood until now had made any difference. He must endure this uncalculated event with the strength of (he could never have thought of this alone) that boyhood.
11.
Karyne did not wear an apron when she cooked (too confining), and she was very careful not to use flour milled from Alaskan wheat (too many pesticides). But she would use thirty of the forty-two grains called for in her “World Cuisine” recipe for breakfast muffins, which she baked three or four times, weekly, for herself.
This morning, as the muffins baked, she took a quick stroll about her herb garden, and when she returned the familiar aroma hung peacefully about the kitchen, reminding her of days when things were less complicated, and life was effortless. She pulled the hot tray from the oven rack and set it on the stove to cool. Then she kicked off her sandals (also too confining) to make the morning’s tea selection.
In another few minutes she took a sip from the ginseng and gingerroot blend she had steeped and removed a steaming muffin from one of the circular holes in the tray. Stopping by her small refrigerator for the yak butter, she finally sat at table, and froze.
A map had grown into the wood grain of the tabletop.
She had never seen it there before: a peculiar light from the adjacent window emphasized strange arrows, irregular polygons, subtle changes in the wood’s color. Karyne pushed the muffin aside, deep into what appeared to be a vast sea, while the tea steamed in the middle of a nearly circular continent. She looked into the center of that continent; it grew white, full of ice, snow—and sand.
But the sand, as she was drawn more deeply into it, was not pure. It was full of little ridges, black troughs, and crossroads. And soon she discovered, very faintly etched across dunes, the letters O, M, A, R.
This actually sent a chill down her rigid body, of the kind she hadn’t had in years. What could these letters mean?
Probably nothing. Nothing, that is, that might be of any consequence to anybody. But there, just under the peninsula that shielded a bay, was a woman’s face.
She wore a veil: neither white nor black, but of a color that shimmered like the tinted waves flowing over her. Her eyes were the color of trees, their pupils like chasms in eroded rock. A dark wave of hair brushed over her forehead like a cloud expanding over the horizon. As Karyne tilted her head and found new angles from which to see her, the woman flickered in and out of Karyne’s sight. Finally she was altogether lost. Karyne fell back against her chair and exhaled. Who had taken so much care with this design? Why?
An ice-capped promontory sparkled at her from under the shadow of the napkin holder. As she leaned closer again she began to feel despair, though she knew not why. The sparkles became more brilliant, joyously flashing over the pointed ice. And then, as if at the end of a sunset, the flashes almost disappeared, leaving sharp hilltops and chiseled edges where the ice had met violent water. Karyne felt an immense sadness now. She felt as if she had had a vision, and that it had tugged her in every emotional direction: as if she had just seen and felt another’s soul.
To her left now, at a corner of the table that lay just under the window, was a wide, white plain. But again, the longer she looked the more she could make out patterns in the white: gently curving lines, lines intersecting, compact rectangles and squares bordering the lines. What she saw was a map of Vydrino, spread right over the flattest part of the frozen continent.
“Novosibirsk!” she whispered.
She looked up, and out the window. The light had changed again. The first snowflakes she had seen in a long time were falling; behind them the sky was heavily white. The grain in the table no longer suggested anything to Karyne. It was an ancient table, full of oil stains, nicks, and chips. She had never even bothered to wash it.
Later in the day she took a walk. The August sun broke out again, showering the old village with new light. Karyne felt she knew Novosibirsk better now: the image of the town’s map, so completely and barely laid out for her on the kitchen table, had stayed with her.
But soon it was replaced with thoughts of her afternoon’s work. (Every day of hers was categorized into three parts: morning, afternoon, and evening; with three quests to fulfill, three blocks of time to spend doing research, writing essays, or reading correspondence.) The idea of taking a walk with no purpose was utterly unknown to Karyne.
This afternoon (it had been planned for a week) was to be spent editing a distant colleague’s writing for improper innuendos and wasteful subtleties, as well as old-style grammatical constructions that might be offensive to children and anyone who did not have command of the language. But first she must visit the supply store to get paper for her antiquated Script Communication Device (the newer SCDs used only voice). It would be a short walk, if walk she must during this previously allotted editing time. She decided to cut through a backyard, why not, in order to get to the supply store sooner.
This backyard was even more unkempt than hers: tall Siberian grasses drying under the sun, a few scattered piles of firewood housing hornets and mushroom groves, a compost box breaking open, and an abandoned birdhouse dangling from one nail on a post. Karyne wondered if the yard had been left unattended for a hundred years, its last keepers driven away by one of
Letters from Novosibirsk