The City in the Middle of the Night

by Charlie Jane Anders

“The secret that you’ve shared,” she says, “it’s the most precious thing in the world. And you’re just opening it to us. I thought everyone was selfish. I thought, that’s the world we live in. But then you go and offer this to us. I can’t tell you what it means.”

I keep thinking I’ve lost all my faith, and then I lose some faith that I forgot I still had. So, thank you.”

Then I hear all of them breathing heavier as the other Gelet make contact. I sigh, because they’ve done it, it’s happening. Now they’ll understand for themselves. I don’t have to be the only one to carry this anymore.

There was literally no way you could know what would happen until you tried. We were the ones who let fear control us.”

Mouth had been hoping for some kind of Answer, the kind of truth she couldn’t get from Barney, or from the Invention. But it was worse for Sophie—she’d strung way too many hopes onto this one thing, and they’d all broken at once. This was just too much death at once, without a clean way to mourn.

“This word just means bad luck. I’m oversimplifying. But your jinx is the person who always shows up and ruins everything for you, just by being there. You can’t get rid of them, whatever you do. Like your fate is intertwined with theirs, and you can’t escape until you figure out why you’re connected. Or if you can learn to live with your jinx, then sometimes the two of you can cooperate to wreck things for everyone else.”

“Well, damn,” Barney said. “You’ve been trying to have a spiritual crisis ever since you came to town. I’m glad you finally succeeded.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t give you a name.” Barney turned the sheep on its axis. “I think maybe you just weren’t impulsive enough for them. They wanted people who would act without stopping to think, to follow their hearts instead of their heads. Sometimes on the road you have to react quickly. But they also didn’t want you to think when you ought to be feeling. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

“That’s because it’s not constructive,” Bianca replies in Xiosphanti for once. “We can’t focus on building a better future if we spend all our time agonizing about things that happened a long time ago. And you won’t get people to help you change the world by telling them they’re descended from criminals. We all spend too much time caught up in the past already, and looking backward all the time is killing us.”

Maybe this is our last chance to have a conversation, just us two, before whatever is going to happen. “I miss you,” I say.

I nurtured all these childish fantasies about Bianca changing the world, with me by her side, but I never thought too much about what “by her side” meant. What was I going to be doing while she dazzled everybody?

“You can’t keep something alive that’s already dead. You can only preserve the remains,

The dead were just like the living: they all wanted something they could never have.

“You learned to overcome the worst fear and communicate across the great divide, and you’ve overturned everything we thought we understood about this world,” Mouth says, chewing her knuckles. “So of course someone was bound to try and weaponize you. I’m just sorry it was Bianca.”

“I never wanted to give up on you,” I say to Bianca in Xiosphanti. “All I ever wanted was to keep following you around and seeing each new thing through your eyes. But I can’t stand to watch you chasing power, or revenge, or whatever it is that you think you crave. You cannot force me to be your tool of conquest, as if I’m the last section of ablative shielding for one of those war machines. And if you insist on trying, then maybe you were right before, and our friendship belongs in the past.”

When I spoke Xiosphanti just now, I identified myself as a student, same as always—but I labeled Bianca an aristocrat, my social better. And I used the formal syntax, as if addressing a stranger.

Bianca said she loved me, long after I’d have sacrificed anything to hear her say those words. I would have worn a tower of ribbons and gone to a hundred terrible parties, just so I could pile every shining toy in the world at Bianca’s feet. I would have braved every gun and every gloved hand in Xiosphant to bring Bianca jewels from the Palace vault. But now I see her in the cockpit, whispering to Dash and twirling one slender hand for emphasis, and I feel empty.

The Gelet haven’t given up on me, even after all the times I failed them. They still want me to join them.

I never loved anybody the way I have loved Bianca. But I know in my shattered core that I would have been a better friend to her if I had walked away in that scrapyard. I need to learn to belong to other people the way everyone else seems to, with one hand in the wind.

The Citizens used to send young people into the night, with a rope tied around their waists to let them find their way out again, and leave them long enough to experience this unbearable disorientation, so they understood the importance of family, the significance of the people who see and understand you. “Absolution,” the Citizens had called that moment of returning to the group after stumbling alone—meaning that the group was accepting you back into its embrace, but also that you understood how absolutely terrible life was without that warmth.

“I’m going to say yes. I need to talk to the Gelet as an equal. And I am so tired of using this clumsy human voice. I never even liked talking. People lie every time they speak. I can finally understand, and be understood, and oh, of course I am going to do this! I have never wanted anything half as much.”

“‘We measure the freedom of human beings by their ability to change with their environment. The only truly alien influence is the dead grasping fingers of our own past.’

I realize that human civilization is based on forgetting. If I own a pair of shoes that used to belong to you, then my ownership relies on your forgetfulness. Humans are experts at storing knowledge and forgetting facts, which is why we saw this city from orbit and then pushed all the evidence into a hole. And I can’t help thinking of what Bianca said when I asked her about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre: that progress requires us to curate the past, to remove from history things that aren’t “constructive.” I don’t know if our power to forget makes humans stronger, more self-destructive, or maybe both.

The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet—servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness—but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or to people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.

I eavesdropped when you met with Bianca, back when you wanted to trick her into helping you steal your poetry book,” Sophie said from the darkness below. “I remember you said, ‘The truth should hurt. Truth should knock you on your butt. Lies make it easy to stand.’” Mouth broke her silence at last. “You paid more attention to me than I paid to myself.”

Mouth would never forgive the Gelet for what they had done, but she could understand it. You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.

You can find the ones who have nothing to lose, who have learned to listen with both ears so they can know when the powerful will come down on them next. The people Bianca was willing to die for. You’ll spot them, and offer them a different chance.”

Mouth knew the next few words she spoke would change her life, maybe ruin what was left of it. But she had no choice: “I’ll protect you.” Sophie was staring at her, and maybe didn’t know how to trust someone whose head was a sealed vault. Mouth added, “I still can’t fight, or use a weapon. And I know I haven’t always kept my promises. But I mean it. I’ll guard you with my life.”

Nothing will change, unless more humans learn to be like me. I remember the climate projections, and the rising trend line. We can’t fix this problem in my lifetime, or even several lifetimes, but we need to start now. There are places Gelet can’t go and things they can’t do, but humans can.

I treat this decision the way I learned to treat my memory-panic. I stop, and I give myself space to feel all the worst emotions. Then I move forward.

This was such a complex idea that one person couldn’t invent it alone and then share it with everyone else—the concept needed to be shaped among two or more people, working together. They couldn’t even share it with the others until they had the concept. And these lovers had discovered a powerful thrill, a joy that went all the way down to their stomachs, in weaving a big idea together. Like some wild rapture, the sensation of helping others to imagine something bigger than yourselves.

join with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community.

I should leave now. The calculating part of me, the part that somehow kept me alive in the midst of so much death, is yelling for me to get out of here. But I stay.

I keep thinking that if I could have just showed Bianca that one memory of drinking tea, when we were too young to understand anything, things would have turned out differently. The teapot was like a harmless sun, radiating heat without the assault of light, and we clustered around it, gossiping and making up stories about what we were going to do when we got free.

“I didn’t come back home to be some living piece of propaganda,” I say.

I don’t try to tell a story, or share a chain of events, I just open up the feeling of being home, in a place where everybody knows your damage, and I let it seep out of me. The memories I have to share are clean and true.