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PS. I’m so happy you read the Mitchison. Constantinople is difficult—but it helps sometimes to think of the book as moving through phases of storytelling time. Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. Halla begins in Mitchison’s Norse myths outside of book-time, and by the end has been absorbed—embedded, perhaps—into the myths of those she travelled with. All good stories travel from the outside in.
• • •
Dear Raspberry,
It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood. Not that it didn’t before—Garden loves music with a depth impossible to sound—but now its song’s for me alone.
Alone. I want to tell you about when I learned that word, really, with all of me. The reason I’m a tumbleweed, a dandelion seed, a stone rolling until she’s planted in place, then kicked up again.
We’re grown, I think you know—seeds planted, roots combing through time, until Garden repots us in different soil. Our seeding points are so thoroughly embedded that what I mentioned before about approach is inconceivable: Garden goes to seed, blows us away, and we burrow into the braidedness of time and mesh with it. There is no scouring hedge to pass through; we are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals. The only way to access us is to enter Garden so far downthread that most of our own agents can’t manage it, find the umbilical taproot that links us to Garden, and then navigate it upthread like salmon in a stream. Which, if any of you could do, would mean we were vanquished already—if you had that kind of access to Garden, you could raze our whole Shift.
(I can’t—I shouldn’t tell you this. In spite of all, I keep thinking—this could be such a long con, this could be the information you wanted all along, this—but does it matter, really? The point of no return was millennia from now, kept folded up small and tea scented in a subcutaneous sack I grew beneath my left thigh. Not exactly a locket full of hair, but no reason that should be less grotesque to the disembodied, I suppose.)
Anyway.
I never mentioned, I think, the strand in which Garden planted the seed of me—“to begin my life with the beginning of my life” feels absurd to such as us, doesn’t it?—but it wasn’t anything special; Strand 141’s Albic parts, in the same year as the death of its Chatterton, though I beg you not to cast my horoscope. When I was very small, still just barely a sprout of Garden rooted through a five-year-old girl, I got sick. This wasn’t unusual—we’re often deliberately made sick, inoculated against far-future diseases, dosed with varying degrees of immortality, whatever it takes to make us into what we need to be when Garden releases us into the wholeness of the braid.
But this was different. This wasn’t Garden infecting me to strengthen me; this was someone infecting me to get at Garden.
This should have been impossible. I was enmeshed. But something, somehow—I was compromised by enemy action. It has the quality of fairy tale to me; I was sleepy, in that space between dream and waking when one can’t be certain whether what one’s seeing is real or a storm of nanites rewiring your synapses.
(I had to deal with that once. It was unpleasant. I hope you never have to electrocute yourself to burn bugs out of your brain. Then again maybe that’s covered in basic training for your lot.)
I remember a kiss and something to eat. It was so kind, I couldn’t fathom it as unfriendly. As fairy tale as it gets, really. I remember bright light, and then—hunger. Hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing—I couldn’t see, I was so hungry, I couldn’t breathe, and it was like something was opening up inside me and telling me to seek. I think some part of me must have been screaming, but I couldn’t tell you which; my body was an alarm bell sounding. I turned all of myself toward Garden to be fed, to stem this, to stop me from disappearing—
And Garden cut me off.
Which is standard operating procedure. Garden must endure. Garden can, does, has, will shed pieces, always, cuttings, flowers, fruit, but Garden endures and grows stronger again. Garden couldn’t let the hunger reach beyond me.
I understand that now, but at the time . . . I had never been alone. And I think of you, making that aloneness for yourself apart from the others as a choice—but for me, I was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream. I touched their faces, and they were mine; I touched the bed I was on, smelled apples stewing somewhere outside. It was as if, in my own small way, I’d become Garden—so me in my wholeness, me in my fingers, in my hair, in my skin, whole the way Garden is whole, but apart.
The hunger simmered in me for a week, during which I ate so much my parents whispered of eggshell stews and hot pokers. I learned to hide it. And then, after a year, Garden took me back.
Grafted me back on as if we’d never severed, probed and peered and sorted through me, doused me in medicines and protection, scoured me inside and out. Nothing was found. My maturation had been sped up oddly, perhaps, but that was all. And after some keen scrutiny during the next few years, the fears that I’d been compromised were mostly laid to rest; nothing in the braid suggested corruption beginning from my strand. Important, too, to broadcast that the attempt at penetrating enmeshment had been unsuccessful (though it had succeeded—but as they never tried it again, Garden’s gambit there must have convinced the relevant parties). So Garden deployed me, made much of me, praised and elevated me, but always at something like arm’s length.
My eccentricities are tolerated: my love of cities, of poetry, my appreciation for being rootless, for being, in some ways, more Gardener than Garden, or Gardened. My appetites, that being flooded with Garden can’t seem to sate.
You, though, Red—
• • •
My Apple Tree, my Brightness,
Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying. I wanted to say, I want to make you tea to drink, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of doing so; I wanted to say, your letter lives inside me in the most literal way possible, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of structures and events. I wanted to say, words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing, a thing that is more than one Shift.
But I didn’t, and you spoke of wounds.
I want to say, now, before you can beat me to it—Red, when I think of this seed in your mouth I imagine having placed it there myself, my fingers on your lips.
I don’t know what this means. This feels like being cut off, again, in the strangest way—feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me.
But I trust you.
Take these years of mine, take these seeds, and let them grow me something similar in reply? I miss the length of your letters.
