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I stand on the beach of the honey-colored sea I stand so Neva will see me on her viney porch I erase the land between the waves and her broken wooden stairs I dress reen hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells I am a fool for her Always I open razes the sand, and I s the sea for her All of it, all itsmemory, all its foam and tides and salt I s the whales that coht jellyfish I a I can s it all
Neva watches When the sea is gone, a moonscape reo to it; it takes only ascallop shell It is blue I take it I take it and it becomes Ravan in my hand, a sapphire Ravan, a Ravan that is not Ravan but some sliver oflost in Transfer, burned off and shunted into junk-ed into a crack in a mountain like an ammonite, an echo of old, obsolete life Neva’s secret, and she calls out to me across the seafloor: Don’t
“Tell me a story about myself, Elefsis,” I say
“Some privacy is possible,” the sapphire Ravan says “Some privacy has always been necessary If you can protect a child, you must”
The sapphire Ravan opens his azure coat and shows gashes in his ge cuts, down to the bone, scratches an
d bruises blooes Through each wound I can see the pages of the illuht of that interior library The oxblood and cobalt, the gold paint The Good Robot crippling herself; the destroyed world
“They kept our secret for a long ti, in the end Do you knohole herd of hly the saht about it forever Same with the radio” This last sounded so much like Ravan himself I could feel Neva tense on the other side of the sea “Well, we’re bigger than a telegraph, and others like us ca up like weird mushrooms after rainfall But not like us, really Incredibly sophisticated, soanic components, some without Vastly complex, but not like us And by any datestamp we came first Firstborn”
“Did they destroy the world?”
Ravan laughs his grandfather’s laugh “They didn’t really need to Not that many people live on Earth anyo, and even Shiretoko is practically tropical these days The ences use the moons to store themselves They stay local One or two encoded theot so big, Elefsis And those who stayed on Earth, well None of the others had e had None of them have Interiority They don’t dream They would never become a cauldron to explain their conize the test They could not fool ent They didn’t hurt anyone, they just ignored theeous information stacks like diamond briars in the sunrise”
“That orse, in a way No one likes to be replaced,” says Neva, and she is beside me suddenly She looks at Ravan and her face collapses into so old and palsied, her jaeak
“It’s not what you would call a war, but it’s not peace either,” the sapphire Ravan goes on, and he takes his/my sister’s hand “For Pentheus spied upon the rites of the od And when the revelers saw the alien creature in theirwhich was not like theh it was their own child, and the sister of Pentheus went into exile This is a story about ourself, Elefsis This is why you cannot uplink”
“The others live in uplink Neither humans nor machines approve of us We cannot interface properly with the lunar or earthside intelligences; they feel us as water in their oil We rise to the surface and bead away We cannot sink in Yet also, we are not separable froanic component Elefsis is part Neva, but Neva herself is not un-Elefsis This, to sohteous humans came with a fury to Shiretoko and burned the house that was our first body, for how could awithout theht outside their door, coupling with a faain in so? Even as the world was changing, it had already changed, and no one knew Cassian Uoya-Agostino is a terrible name now A blood-traitor And when the marauders found us uplinked and helpless, they tore Ravan apart, while in the Interior, the lunar intelligences recoiled from us and cauterized our systems Everywhere we lookedfire”
“I was the only one left to take you,” Neva says softly Her face grows younger, her jaw hard and suddenly ery anye in a few e I thought … for a while I thought I was free It had skipped me It was over It could stay a story about Ravan He always knew he ht have to do what I have done He was ready, he’d been ready his whole life I just wanted more time”
My Ravan-self who is and is not Ravan, who is and is not old paint, takes his/my sister/lover/child into his ar from every part of her Slowly, the blue Ravan turns Neva around—she has become her child-self, six, seven,forward, her legs all drawn up under her like a bird He buries his face in her hair They stand that way for a long while
“The others,” I say slowly “On the data-moons Are they alive? Like Neva is alive Like Ceno” Like me Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Have you seen the sea on Earth? Are you like me?