The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 1: Threeforks

THREEFORKS

I thank the panImaginer for this feast, said my dad. It wasn't even food. He was looking at the sunset through the trees, all bony with winter. Look, he said, that one's waving its arms. As we walked, he showed me stained glass windows in branches and faces in trunks.

We came up the south stream of Threeforks, past one of the forks and out of the trees to a big field of last year's long brown grass all weathered. I said, Hey dad, show me the faces in the grass.

He looked like he had never thought of that before, to go just one plant over. He pondered it as we walked, up the cobbled path between the Plush and the plots of the hobby farmers, over a wooden bridge and through a little park to the timber and cob conapt we called home.

My dad sighed and said, I am the straw through which God drinks God.

I said, Why doesn't God just drink himself straight? Why does he need you?

He sighed and said, I ask myself that all the time.


My name is Tansy Capstone, Tansy being a wiry flower and Capstone the name my dumb ancestor chose in the last renaming. I'm lucky to have it. The capstone is the perfect thing that you put on top of a building to make it perfect. It gives people completely the wrong idea about me.

My dad's name was Radagast Capstone. He came to the Institute to get his Master of Morphic Resonance, and then turned down a paid job in Seedle, keeping the lid on the feral cat population, to stay here and follow his dream of tree pareidolia.

Because of the Institute, Threeforks is an oasis in yokel-land. The hills are all nativists and hippies, but in town we had three different fuzz bass and oboe bands, and seven different we-are-all-god religions. I couldn't wait to get out, and since then I've hardly seen a place better.

The Institute gets a ton of creds from the treasury, but because this is utopia, the only paid jobs are grunts and cleaners. They gave dad an office that he filled with rubbings and daguerrotypes, stacked and tacked all around the wall: faces in bark, bodies in branches, shapes in not-branches, and my favorites, the landscapes. It might be a big mossy trunk where the moss became trees, or an aspen with bark wrinkles like waves on the ocean. You had to look just right to see the depth.

My mom was way cooler, I don't know why she married my dad. Her life was a series of obsessions that became conveniences: Dad, camping, me, macrame, tarot, daguerrotypes, which is how he got the idea, watercolor, pottery, closed eye visuals. I hope she wasn't obsessed with me for too long, that would have been annoying.

Her name was Tetra Pentameron, but that surname was owned by the cult of Honorific Disorder. She couldn't give it to me or we would all have to convert, and I never let her forget it. She'd say, Pick up your room. I'd say, What, and betray my people?

Mom's folk were rich way back. They lost it all in Jubilees, but they snuck a lot through the personal item exemptions, and lived ever since by selling off heirlooms and relics. We had the mummified hand of Saint Vitus, but we couldn't tell anyone until he passed out of veneration.

We didn't have a private chariot or anything, but we ate strawberries we didn't grow and bread we didn't bake, and got our poop carried off for composting. And the main income was me.

The other kids called me an auctioned-off abortion. But I called them worse, and they weren't wrong. Since the fertility games got canceled, our province was depopulating so fast that benefactors jumped all over each other to subsidize babies. My mom got the Flexers and neo-Mennonites in a bidding war and I ended up being worth two or three regular kids. Sometimes she would get drunk and call me "my little hostage".

AFIELD

I could take care of myself early. Mom appreciated that, and gave me a lot of slack. On free days I went far afield, out past the cows and lentils and into the wild hills.

I would lie under yarrow seedheads, watching the feathery leaves tickle the clouds, and try to imagine something even better. On hot days I'd be down some north slope under hawthorns, barbed-wire branches in layers that slid across each other as I swayed my head.

Sometimes I'd go out at night and Dad would try to stop me. It's after dark, he'd say. You're only whatever years old. Mom would say, stop coddling her.

He'd say, At least let me go with you. I'd say, What, and take away my stealth?

In a minute I'd be around the corner and over the tracks. The spikes had been scavenged so long ago that the rails had become all twisty, rusted in the knottiness of their forging. Between them, in spring, bloomed tiny blue flowers, their Oracles tuned to the ancient fungi still digesting creosote.

I didn't walk the tracks at night, I didn't want to tempt the coyotes. Instead, I usually took the cobbled path to Cedric's. We weren't supposed to hang out, because we were so un-inbred that they needed us to breed, and being friends as kids will kill that. But he was the only not-boring person my age.

His family lived down by the river. These are enlightened times, we don't have social class. But in town, the hill people are snooty and the river people are crusty. Cedric's family had socks drying on chairbacks and rugs rarely shaken out. Cedric, in rebellion, was super-tidy. He even made his bed, and he polished the softwood floor to a shine.

Along a whole wall he had almost a hundred books. His fam lived super-light on the Scrip and he got creds to order overland mail, ancient books transcribed by monks, last-age vellum and myceline, fanfics and screeds from the presses of Seedle.

My favorite was called Ancient Astronauts. It had all this evidence that it wasn't mythology, that they really did send a rocket to the moon. They didn't have to get through the stars because they manifested them higher, so far that they sent messages millions of miles into space, looking for someone who, I don't know, manifested the same universe?

The books were in some kind of order that only Cedric understood. I said, What if I sneak in and rearrange them?

Then I'd have to kill you, because how do I know, if I put them back, you won't rearrange them again?

I said, I could alphabetize them, which you should do anyway.

How would you do the categories?

One category: For dweebs.

DIAGNOSIS

"Everywhere normality of the mind may be observed. The habitants adroitly perform the motions which fed them yesterday, last week, a year ago. I have been informed of my aberration well and full."

-Jack Vance, Guyal of Sfere

By age seven I had been diagnosed with aplacebia, irresonance, dysmanifestation, and empathic palsy. My dad, always curious, asked the doctor, What are the odds of all four happening together?

Zero, said the doctor, until now.

So first, placebos don't work on me at all. Not that I was sickly, but sometimes they had to dig out the old books to find out what works even if you don't believe in it.

Irresonance is when you can't tune into the do-it-without-thinking of your kind. Maybe some other kind, but not humans. Everyone who ever moved is supposedly informing my muscles. My muscles are like, hello? My head has to manage the whole job, and it was so hard that I put all my mind into my eyes. Mom said I could read books before I could hold them up, and she would turn the pages for me.

Manifestation is actually making shit be the way you want it. I thought they were joking about manifesting salmonberries on a hike, surely they just found them. But when I went out, I got nothing. As soon as another kid boasted of his bounty, I said prove it, let's go out together.

Of course his bounty was nowhere. He said the actual hedges had moved or been dis-ripened. I ate this exact one, he said, and now it's a flower. After that, nobody wanted to walk with me anywhere. They wouldn't even let me watch their dice games, because I'd turn a contest of wizardry into blind chance.

It turned out my mom was also dysmanifestational, and she hid it from my dad, in case his belief would pass it on to me. It didn't work. She was the only person in town, other than me, who had never seen the stars dance.

Empathic palsy means I don't care about other people. It's not my fault if other people aren't interesting. But I don't want to be the baddie. Morality is like sport. Before I can do it right, I have to grind through a lot of mistakes.

CHURCH

They made me do moral therapy with our priest. Mom believed that God is mad and fate is incompetent. Everything happens for a reason, she said -- a bad reason. But to keep getting paid for my existence, we had to pick a church and all go as a family. I told Dad, You should make your own cult, you could be high priest of the Radagastarians. Instead he picked mainline Pansolipsism, probably because it had the most dweebs.

Father Ripple told me it actually was my fault that other people aren't interesting. I don't know, that's taking solipsism pretty far. Another thing he said was: Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.

I said, But if you humble yourself just to get exalted, aren't you still exalting yourself? He thought about it a long time and finally said, I guess God likes that loophole.

The next week he did a sermon about it. The panImaginer likes that loophole, he said, and the whole church laughed.

On a beat, he hit the liturgy: I am a tendril of the Unknowable, dabbling in unknowing. If this life shall be remembered, live it well. If it shall be forgotten, what a life it was!

At that cue, the hippie choir sang:

When petrolithic engineers
Cannot tell gneiss from schist
Then who can say, from what appears
What later will exist?
The mind will fill a firmament
Though all the sky is mist

So let us not be permanent
But bend to meet our fears
The last alighting light is you
The liminial will let us through
The laws of physics can't be true
Til all the world is fairy gears

Later I asked Dad, What's physics, and he went on and on about the particle paradigm, and the primacy of time and space, like it was all a superstition. I said, But they blasted out the mountain passes. What did we do?

APOPALYPSE

"They strolled beneath trees whose roots plunged into interred edifices - dislodging tiles, cracking ceilings, dislocating columns - and passed through fields where wild vegetables flourished upon marvels of art, evidence that the ravages of time beset even the most beautiful things."

-Theophile Gautier, "Arria Marcella", translated by Elsa Tonkinwise

Even before I went to school, Dad told me all about the Ancients. How they built the cathedrals, and flew jets around the world both ways, and made engines so small you could put a hundred on the head of a pin, all flashing a million times a second through wires of light, so you could send memes to Abyssinia.

I dreamed of glass towers and bullettrains, a billion people burning the Earth and reaching for the stars. I imagined myself the Executrix of Tansy Air-o-Space, and sick of fame, I sold the whole thing and traveled incognito, by sky chariot and train-hop, as the Apopalypse came on.

Apopalypse. We're not supposed to call it that because it's offensive to Transcendentalists, who need the big thing to always be in front of them. But the Ancients believed in it, and it sure looks like they had it, throwing their streets and pipes to every horizon, beaming screen dreams to the world. No one knows how they got away with it for so long, Science, the ancient magic of making everyone see everything the same way.

Did humanity bust out of a cocoon? Did the out-there world go on strike? Did they spend all their magic on one moonshot, and then noticed they were standing on air? Whatever, everyone agrees that everyone agreed to disagree, that what was real got atomized, and that the atom is you.

They must still be out there, the most talented dreamers, surfing the unmediated plenum, grazing our stodgy world and leaving trails of stars. But normally when two worlds meet, if one is better, the other decides its own world was a dream inside that one. It's like soap bubbles, you start with a foam and eventually there's one big lame bubble.

But for a while, fifty years or five hundred, there was a golden age where every gaggle of misfits had their own oddball universe. That's where all the cool stuff comes from that we've been feeding off ever since, foodfabs and magjets, fiches and Oracle mashups.

At the Institute they call it the Transition. To what, they don't say. Everyone else calls it the last age. Since then, we haven't done any age-like things.

CREDS AND FICHES

Greater Cascadia has annual creds. One year it might be a heron, the next year a bear. If you're stuck with the old stuff, the treasury will give you two for three, but everyone tries to spend it before it expires. Then, every solstice and equinox, every living person and secretly dead person gets the Scrip. They don't want the poor to have to spend all their creds on food, so every town also has to provide free scrip biscuits. Pumped out from foodfab crust and local goop, scrip biscuits are required to have all the elements and humours and sufficient inessentials, and to taste worse than any food you pay for.

Dad had to have pareidolia portfolios from around the world, and Mom had to have gear for her latest thing, so we were always finding clever ways to eat non-terrible food. In the fall we made apple pies with fab flour and wingnut oil, baked in the sun oven. For the apples, Dad would take me out foraging. I'd shake the tree and he'd pick up the ones that fell, and always try to sneak in ones that were already on the ground.

I said, Are you trying to give me worms? He said, It's a different kind of worms. I said, Like there's a good kind of worms! Oh, but there are. In a few years I'd be stripping bark from fallen trees and eating grubs like candy.

I spent a lot of creds on books. The paper of the ancients was self-destroying, with acids that made it turn to dust in only centuries. Everything not on paper vanished even faster. What were they hiding? But last age presses transcribed lots of classics. The library had Wuthering Heights and Lolita, Lao Tzu and Spinoza on clean vellum.

When I finished everything good from the library and also from Cedric, I started ordering fiches from the stacks of Seedle. Fiches are a last age tech evolved from ancient tiny daguerrotypes. You scan a book through a Zonkinator crystal, which keeps it from changing too much, and the ghost of the book goes into a fiche, a cartridge the size of your little finger. You put it in a wand and shake it, and a tiny light projects, on any flat surface, pretty much the book. It's forbidden to open one up and see how it works, because then we'd find out exactly how it's impossible.

They only made so many wands. I had to use a whole season's creds to get one. Then I would stand on the pigeon platform, waiting for my bird to come in with the fiche of some space pirate serial, Harridans of the Troposphere or Witches of the Pinspecked Void. I'd see it coming from the yellow Seedle Stacks canister hanging from the pigeon's ankle. When it entered its perch, the maglatch reversed and the canister tumbled down a chute where I claimed it.

Then I was off to the deepest stairwell to read it, the words bent by pits in the ancient concrete, how the crew of the Rabbithole Grommet was beset with age reversal, and the Princess went into pre-existence.

COMPARATIVE RELIGION

The subsidy required me to go to school. We're a zero coercion society, so I would have been totally free to not go to school and my family would have to live on scrip biscuits.

I always annoyed my teachers by not being interested in whatever it was they were trying to teach. I'd say, I want to learn shadow walking, and it was so awkward, they all knew I was dysmanifestational, they felt so bad for me that they left me alone to pace the playfield. I imagined I would wear a rut to downscroll Australia and battle dingos.

It turned out I couldn't annoy both my teachers and my parents. On the way home from our church, where I never sang, I would sing the songs of the other churches we passed, like:

Allu Akbar, God is great
Life's a snackbar, don't be late

My dad had to explain how their actual theology says you can be as late as you want, and by then I'd be singing the next one:

We all float together on the void, on the void
We all float together on the void
From the edges of your eyes to the edges of your fear
From the furnace of your heart to your great big rear
Keep us all apart, try us on for size
We all float together on the void

Dad ratted me out to my teachers, for knowing all the words, and they were like, at last she's interested in something possible: religion. They set me up a sit-in with every service, and I had to write a report. This is some of it:

[*These two lines are from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens.]

After all that, I decided the Pansolipsists weren't so bad. I started singing along with the hymns, quietly mouthing my own words:

Suck the gut and free the ass
The butthole says, this too shall pass
Bust a nut and rip a seam
Life is but a dream

TEACHERS

About the time I finished with comparative religion, I got the irresonance diagnosis. Suddenly every trainer in town wanted to try me. I burned through boxers and ballerinas, gymnasts and stick fighters. A blank slate, they all thought, muscles unmolded by custom.

What it amounted to was training me through a straw. I don't know where to start, they'd say, and I'd say, Can I go now? Then they'd pick out their favorite body part, and whittle my error down to not knowing some arcane motion that they took for granted.

Whoa, they'd say, was I doing that? After two or three times, they'd run off to work on their own stuff.

The first one that stayed was a bodybuilder. I was so feeble that he got the Institute to biopsy my fibers, and his eyes bugged at the results. Your cells are so willy-nilly, he said, I don't know how you can move at all.

We started with the tiniest exercises, one finger, two finger, three finger curl, it was so tedious, and all the while him zapping me with his experimental myocyte aligner. But after a week, I cracked an actual walnut in my fist. That's what bust a nut meant in my song. It was so cool, I let him try to fix my posture.

You look like a saggy puppet, he said, put your shoulders back, and of course I did completely the wrong thing. He finally explained what he really wanted and I said, Why didn't you say that in the first place?

He came back from pondering and tried all kinds of almost right instructions that still didn't work, heel-toe to pelvis tilts and head on a string. But we kept at it, and finally we cracked the combo. Balls of the feet, tight stomach and tucked chin, which kept me from sticking my head forward like a dweeb.

Now, he said, all you need is to be loose. Yeah, good luck teaching that. But he let me keep using the myocyte aligner. Later he sold one to every hospital in Greater Cascadia. Luckily they barely worked on normal muscles, or they'd be illegal. But in one summer I got so strong I had to hide it or people would get freaked out.

Now that I liked it, I tried inviting back some of my body coaches, but they were off giving seminars on the subtle motions of the whatnot, except the stick fighter. He had to design an extra squishy stick so I wouldn't brain him, and finally he said, Let's work on subtlety, and gave me a willow switch.

I even tried to go out for sports. A few years sooner, they wouldn't let me play because it would embarrass me. Now they wouldn't let me play because it would make me feel superior. I wish people would care more about their own feelings, and less about mine.

SIM-PSILOCIN

Gran lived up on the edge of the hill. With depopulation, houses are always coming open, and she was tipped of Miss Ossifer's passing and moved right in after the funeral.

She had a big patio for parties, and a reframed ancient garage with a kitchen above. That way she could drop food scraps straight to her chickens, and every month or two she'd kill one, and invite the whole family to feast on chicken and biscuits and buckwheat mead. Family being Mom and Dad and me, and then her nosy neighbors would see us and bring their own chickens, and they'd all end up singing Infinite Wishes around the firepit:

Got a day pass to heaven washing dishes
The righteous they sure drink the beer
If I really have infinite wishes
How did I end up here?

You'd think they'd run out of rhymes, but they just kept going with more verses. This was another:

I'm starting to get superstitious
What happens is just what I fear
If I really have infinite wishes
How did I end up here?

I wandered off and stood on the very lip of the hill, looking down over my stomping grounds, when Gran came up and said, Girl, you've got a glow to you.

I said, What does it look like?

You're charged with fate. Can you feel it?

That sounds like my teacher. She says I can be anything I want.

You absolutely can't. There are things you have to do, whether you want to or not.

Then I'll just do what I want anyway, and make fate do the work.

There's a good girl.


After that I started hanging out more with Gran. As an elder, she got slack for lawbreaking, and could give me drugs underage. It's medicine, she said. A quarter dram of sim-psilocin never hurt anyone. They should give it to babies. For you it might already be too late.

One Saturday I went up, and she sat me in her workshop and measured my head for the dosage. First she tickled my scalp with a spidery massager strapped to a vibrating hand-pack, where she twisted knobs to find the thrum of the skull. Then she had my eyes follow her finger while a Blickinator plumbed my cortex.

She said, Your neuronic density and synaptical disorder are both off the scale. Good job, you beat the test. She tweaked a dial and shook her head. Girl, your brain can swallow psychs like the sea. There's not enough sim-psilocin in Threeforks, and I should know.

Sim-psilocin is an Oracle echo of magic mushrooms. You could grow them but it was easier to scrape the crust off a vat of goop. There's no way it tasted better. I could only choke down a triple dose while Gran dipped her single dose in tea.

Pretty soon she was curled up under a blanket, muttering incantations, while I felt maybe a little lightheaded. But I got a chance to look around her workshop. There was a crude foodfab for her chickens, and I refilled the sawdust. Then, in a drawer with the screwdrivers, I found what I was looking for. She'd never miss it.

CEVs

Every time my mom really wanted to talk to me, she used a trick, and it always worked. You were right, she said. This time I didn't even remember being right. It was when I was three years old and still half baked for this world. But Mom said I was waving my fingers in the sun, strobing my eyelids.

When she asked what I was doing, I said making movies, even though I'd never seen one, and I told her the whole process, from four-pointed star to tunnel to path through the woods.

I must have been a lot smarter at three years old. Now after nine years she was finally bored enough to try it. I'd find her kneeling before the sun, head up, elbows awkward, thumbs on temples and fingers twiddling to strobe her lids. Whenever I came up it always seemed to get better. Ooh, she'd say, a carousel!

My dad said, Why don't you use a strobe light? He went to Hog Heaven for the parts, and after a week it still didn't work. I took a look and he had a huge solder glob shorted to the casing. He's such a goofball. After he fixed it, Mom could trip day and night.

She had friends in other towns, and she got them doing it. They compared notes over pigeon post and one time they all reported doing the same beach walk, ocean on the right and town on the left. That gave my dad a dangerous idea.

He was a big good-doer, but the one law that bugged him was the information speed limit. It was in the laws of every confederation within two world turns: Information shall move no faster than a man on horseback, a bird in flight, or the wind.

If you break that law, everyone from bureaucrats to jihadis will be after you. Only dweebs like my dad wanted to keep trying after all the disasters. He rankled at the info-puritans, and described all the ways you might get around them. Beacons in the hills, obscure frequencies, semaphores on mountaintops, pareidolic smoke signals, cannon shots of rubberized fiches, relays of bird calls.

Synchronous closed eye visuals were not on the map. With three sigmas of improbability, Dad said, you could send reliable messages, and the key is doing it at the same time. The ancients had time so objectified that any two people in the world could line up just by looking at their clocks. Now local time is so wonky that two clocks in perfect sync can't go a town apart and come back the same. But in time beneath time, they're still in sync.

That was a pretty weird thing for my dad to say, but he got obsessed with making synchronous strobes, their flashes timed from clocks that were forged identically. He took a ditch-digging gig to pay for it: a ten-pack of crystal clock kits from Frisco. We ate biscuits and modquats for a week, and then I had to watch him solder, fumes of plumbum and flux paste probably frying my brain or I'd be too smart for my own good. If I didn't watch, he'd dream himself laying mirror like an artist, while his lugs jumped the circuits.

When he got them all working, he lined them up and had me watch as the numbers diverged. Dang, he said, they were working before. Obviously he was over-manifesting, so then I had to watch as he tweaked the varistors until they were millisecond-sync.

I helped Mom figure out a language, stuff like sunburst for hello and checkerboard for clear, and we sent out seven. I said I didn't want one. Dad broke his, and Mom probably got bored before summer.

THE OUTER DARK

I had been listening to the thrum of the town. Ears are easier than eyes to go wide with, and as the evenings got warmer, I'd go up on the rooftop and listen to cartwheels on the highway, balcony chatters, a handsaw at the joinery, far whoops from students at the Institute, the river.

My parents probably still thought I was going out. For once they were both in the kitchen, which had a heat vent to the roof. I don't know how long they were talking about me, before I noticed it over the grasshoppers.

I'm surprised she's still here, said my mom.

She's only thirteen. Solo roaming isn't legal until fourteen.

By then, half the summer will be gone.

You're not even worried, about our daughter in the outer dark?

The outer dark? There are ships on the high seas, right now, waiting for sky and sea to merge so they can skip the oceans. There are archipelagoes of islands bigger on the inside. In Caxiletas there are canyons so timestretched no one has come out yet. Even our backyard is two passes from the High Planes, and from there it's two whims to Gondwanaland. And you call it the outer dark.

Dishes clinked. My dad said, you know...

We'll deal with it. I've done gardening.

In the morning I sent a query by express pigeon. It took ten days, any less and I wouldn't have had time to say goodbye to all the trees and paths around town. Lucky for my folks, it came back negative:

Registry of Immanence
Seedle, Greater Cascadia

Query: Number of living venerators of Saint Vitus
Result: Zero

I left it on my bed.