Stories want to tell themselves. But real stories go on and on, without ends, without beginnings, all middle all the time.
Did you read Everfair? If so, that may be how you have come to these words. That may do to lead you into what these words mean. Or you may prefer an alternative.
You can start telling a story with what you hear first, and where, and when. Your beginning can be there and then.
For Example
The story could begin with one man. Dr. U Shin is the name for that man and what he signifies, though the name’s bare translation carries no such import. A wanderer of many kinds of lands in his early days, eventually he settled at the confluence of plain, rivers, and mountains known as the Northern Capital. Beijing. He studied, then taught, at Beijing’s Normal College, formalizing his already extensive understanding of plants and animals. He also became convinced by his students and colleagues that the brutalities he’d observed in his travels—soldiers gutting sons before their fathers’ eyes, starving villagers buried alive by heaps of their neighbors’ corpses—were the exact opposite of inevitable. Revolution could cure the deadly disease lying at their roots. The anarchists gathering under the banner of the May Fourth Movement were busy formulating and fomenting it.
In the low, airy laboratories he shared with his movement comrades, Dr. Shin sought a natural means to develop the relationships necessary for the triumph of social anarchism. Like the graceful aspens whose groves filled the high valleys he’d visited on his journeys, like the crows wheeling in black flocks through the stormy skies, people must be connected. So he believed. Otherwise, the world would destroy itself with war. That it had not already done this was owing to the very tenuous threads tying humans together into groups larger than the nations they officially belonged to, nations bent on mutual slaughter. To prevent another such planetwide disaster, these threads must be spun tighter and stronger, and there must be many more created. So he thought. And so he directed his research.
He found some answers.
Led by the brilliance of Hoshi, a Japanese woman who had stubbornly stayed in China when her emperor’s troops withdrew, Dr. Shin discovered the organic precursor to the Spirit Medicine that was afterward used by the May Fourth Movement. And in concert with Hoshi and others—the names these others were assigned at birth don’t matter as much as what they did—he created the Spirit Medicine out of this precursor fungus, nourishing it and making of it a substance capable of binding humans to one another in new ways. He also developed protocols for its administration. The most effective of these protocols were those performed in person, but mass administration could predispose large populations to easy influence and incorporation into the whole later, as long as individual sympathizers to the revolution followed it up.
Still, there were drawbacks. For one thing, the sensual nature of kinning, as Hoshi and Shin came to call the process of forming Spirit Medicine–bonded groups, could frighten off potential recruits. Some already in sexual or romantic relationships brought their partners along with them. These attested to its healthiness. But some—mother-daughter pairs and others anxious to avoid the slightest hint of incest in their doings, and those who wished to live their lives completely chaste—hung back. They promised they would fight in May Fourth’s revolution without benefit of the special abilities bestowed by treatment with the Spirit Medicine—the heightened empathy shared with fellow inoculants, and the enhanced sensitivity to the smell of lies.
For another thing, each act of kinning led to the formation of only a small affinity group, groups that Hoshi dubbed “cores.” Anywhere from three to six people could join together so. In the presence of seven or more, no further kinning took place. Trying to add a seventh to an existing core only resulted in the sort of incomprehension with which decadent white men viewed their brown servants.
Seeking to combat the limitations imposed by their size, Dr. Shin adjusted the Spirit Medicine’s application procedures and its subsequent growth patterns so that, in each core, one member was able to connect with other, similar members and so to influence their cores—powerfully, though indirectly. He called such members “nodes.”
The erotic charge that permeated kinning proved stubborn. Neither Shin nor Hoshi nor any of their revolutionary colleagues were able to eliminate it before the May Fourth Movement requested a large store of spores to be carried abroad by their newly commissioned aircanoe, Xu Mu. Fortunately, Ho Bee-Lung, sister of Xu Mu’s designer, Ho Lin-Huang, had come up with a promising new Spirit Medicine strain that seemed to work as well as the original, but without its troublesome, potentially sexual side effects.
Which is the point at which Chapter One starts. Perhaps, however, you’d like a broader view?
In That Case
The antagonist’s perspective offers a completely different angle on any story.
To the minds of many Europeans, much of the world appeared useless during much of its history. Widespread warfare heightened this perception. There were winners and there were losers, and the winners of the Great War—France, England, Russia, and the United States of America, chiefly—had no patience with its losers—Germany, Hungary, Turkey, and their allies. These minds classified the losers as beggars pleading for scraps of the winners’ wealth and culture, with that traitorous side-switcher Italy bottom of the rank.
Even lower in estimated value than Italy, though, stood the Europeans’ colonies, whether friendly or hostile to the winners’ cause. Lands that were home to non-Caucasians were deserts, swamps, jungles, wildernesses rank with the odors of untamed savages … they were worth only whatever could be ravished away from them.
Until the colonies provided answers to two questions. The first of these was: Why were the vast majority of the victims of the Maltese Influenza white? Review of their living circumstances brought a touch of clarity to the issue, because when whites lived abroad and in close proximity to coloreds—in cities such as Alexandria and Bombay and Mombasa—the disease caused them far fewer casualties. Rumors of a secret vaccine coincided with the discovery of early trials of May Fourth’s Spirit Medicine and led to the conclusion that that was the source of the lower orders’ protection and its extension to the higher orders.
This conclusion was erroneous. The protection was due to an earlier epidemic caused by a more benign version of the same disease.
In any event, acting upon the Europeans’ incorrect conclusion would have been hard. What were they supposed to do? Steal and reproduce a formula developed by their inferiors? Should it work as they hoped, the chance of unwanted consequences was still fairly certain; not only were the originators of the substance that they believed to be a vaccine Orientals, they were anarchists. Perhaps the vaccine would give those who partook of it subversive tendencies.
The idea of an alternative to May Fourth’s Spirit Medicine was an enticing one for Eastern Europe—especially for Russia, which shared long stretches of its border with China. Russia’s ruling dynasty had barely survived a homegrown revolt, a revolt destroyed almost as much by the epidemic as by the efforts of the Romanovs. The ranks of the insurrectionist party’s majority faction, the so-called Bolsheviks, were decimated by deadly waves of disease. Because of their foreign appearance, May Fourth’s anarchists were easily spotted when they attempted to fill the void that caused. Frightened agriculturalists quickly responded to the allure of the anarchists’ Spirit Medicine with a vaccine of their own, and shared it with the rest of Europe almost at once in order to prove their purity to skeptics of Russia’s whiteness.
Some consequences of the so-called Russian Cure they came up with could be just as unpleasant as those of the Spirit Medicine, though: a statistically significant number of the Russian Cure’s recipients underwent a strange transformation, seeking out open fields and sinking knee-deep into the soil. Gradually, over the course of several summer weeks, they became sedentary and voiceless, though responding to the presence of friends through their facial expressions and gestures. Estimates varied, but this syndrome seemed to directly affect only about 5 to 8 percent of those treated.
Its indirect effects were more widespread. Religious cults developed around the afflicted, who were believed by the most popular new sect to be God’s chosen, and by a large rival group to be possessed by evil demons. Theological arguments on the topic sundered churches, cities, nations, became heated, devolved into fear-fueled riots, and Europe’s functional population, already ravaged by the ’flu, shrank further.
But the continent’s hunger for land grew beyond all previous bounds.
Often the loved ones and relations of the victims of the Russian Cure’s unfortunate side effects camped beside those victims, joined by devotees waiting for their “quickenings”—returns to their former vitality heralding their ascendance to heaven. No one knew exactly when and how these quickenings would happen, but many faithful adherents of this theory stayed nearby, singing hymns and ministering to the planteds’ needs, fending off those who attacked them as devil-ridden. Still-weary veterans of the Great War fought to keep the various factions separate, leaving wide strips of land between the planteds’ enclaves abandoned.
Thus the need for a second question and a second answer. This question, in fact, had been asked earlier and ignored: What would it take to turn the salt-drowned acres under the Mediterranean into inhabitable land? The Italian intellectuals who proposed to demonstrate the idea’s feasibility were at first laughed off. Their “Atlantropa” was too obviously a ploy to increase their own country’s territory. Also, given the extent of the Maltese ’flu’s casualties, the need for expansion wasn’t all that pressing. Not at first.
But then.
Quickly, the unforeseen reaction to the Russian Cure spread on the heels of its wide administration. Responses varied; relatively progressive governments, and the governments of the countries hit hardest by the ’flu, refused to stop giving it out, despite certain religious groups’ demands. More conservative regimes cut back—until it was discovered that ’flu patients on the verge of death could be semi-revived, roused at least to the side-effect victims’ vegetative state. All clamored for this service to be granted to those in their care.
Gazing out from their tall towers, their high halls and gilded palaces and polished marble courts, viewing a landscape filling with mysteriously sessile citizens who took over an increasing number of farm plots and sparked a deepening feud promising to spill massive quantities of blood, those in power found that building a dam across the Straits of Gibraltar suddenly became not just conceivable but quite a practical project.
Within Possibility
The birth of Atlantropa could be considered the best of all this story’s potential beginnings, because of the project’s status as a rising threat, and its plain path from hope to execution. As an idea, it came seemingly from the depths of night: a Romanian man named Horatiu, citizen of one of the nations worst devastated by the strange, crippling reactions some had to the Russian Cure, mentioned it as a dream in his daily journals—though all but immediately afterward the Italians adopted it as a concept, becoming Atlantropa’s most vocal champions.
And the Italians were also among the very first to station operatives and engineers on the sites of Atlantropa’s future dams. They disguised their agents as diplomats, but only thinly; most knew why Signores Gravina and Gentileschi served their government on the shores of Gibraltar’s straits. And everyone expected Signore Ercolano’s simultaneous mission to Cairo to succeed, for the plan to enlarge and improve the canal connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas was immensely popular, regardless of its importance to the Atlantropa scheme.
What no one anticipated was the opposition arising in India. Thousands of miles, mountains, glaciers, and language and cultural barriers lay between the subcontinent and the lands to be drowned and dried out by Atlantropa’s completion. Why was it of any concern to the Indians? Why did it move pan-Indian separatists to found the rebel nation named Bharat—a name stolen from anti-Muslim bigots?
Britain’s pro-Atlantropans attributed the Bharatese secession to the heavy-handedness of their rival faction, the Restorers. Britain’s Restorers sought to take advantage of their country’s lower death toll to reestablish their fast-loosening hold over an empire where, just a short while ago, the sun never set.
But Atlantropa would guarantee a larger playground for Britain’s ambitions: new territories could be claimed along Africa’s and Arabia’s extended coasts. Betting that continued ’flu casualties would weaken Europe and so hinder the majority of white nations from cashing in on the coming land rush, British proponents of the Atlantropa project fielded their own secret operatives. They cooperated with Italy but maintained a separate organization. They were so successful that they even managed briefly to cross into the outer fringes of Bharat. Only the unaccountable (to the spies) tendency of their guides and contacts to misunderstand directions kept them from truly penetrating into Bharatese territory and learning the source of the mysterious opposition to their cause.
It was in the celebration of a local ritual, Raksha Bandhan, that the roots of this resistance could have been found—had the British known where and how to look for them. A student of Dr. Shin’s brought one of the earliest iterations of May Fourth’s Spirit Medicine with him to Patna; a teacher there whose notions of the importance of national identity exceeded those of the leading secessionists invited him to participate in the ritual with her. The student filled the role of brother, receiving from the teacher a bracelet binding them to protect one another (for the teacher’s views on gender roles were unconventional). The bracelet’s freshwater pearls, and drilled seeds, and cut and felted fur, spoke of life’s intertwining strengths. Inspired, the traveling student not only kinned with the teacher and her aunt and uncle but trained her to administer the Spirit Medicine’s spores herself, and then settled in to help her inoculate the rest of the region.
In this way the vast majority of northwest India’s populations came to declare themselves an independent nation. And because their nodes recognized the threat Atlantropa posed to cores kinning along the Mediterranean’s shores, they pledged themselves to fight it.
The Bharatese sent a delegation westward to Arabia and Egypt, where they tried, with very little success, to infiltrate European operations. The growing use of the Russian Cure stymied them. There was as yet no thought of blending that organism with the Spirit Medicine, which anyway still consisted of just the original variety.
Closer to home, the Bharatese had better luck, inoculating high Ceylonese officials who worked directly under Governor Manning. But their greatest achievement involved sending a delegation east to Bangkok, May Fourth’s nearest official outpost at the time, to urge speedier sowing of the Spirit Medicine’s spores. They also incubated and delivered the quickly accepted plan to inoculate telegraph cables and weave the resulting growths into a revolutionary alternative: a worldwide communications web.
This was a difficult accomplishment to aim for, of course. And time-consuming: though Ho Lin-Huang was going to fly the movement’s aircanoe over two continents and lay spores along lines connecting two more, that itinerary would leave an entire hemisphere yet untouched.
Beyond Possibility
So far you’ve been treated to visions of story beginnings situated in the Spirit Medicine’s creation, in its opposition, and in some of the scenarios of its distribution. All within the realm of the senses. All verifiable.
But true visions can also be born behind closed eyes. True visions rely on more than facts. Think of fairy tales.
Think of what you’ve just read. Do you see pictures in your mind? Do you see those waving fields of human wheat? Those earnest, revolutionary cables swimming over golden sand and sinking under black, mud-filled bays? Those salt-soaked bottomlands rising pale and stinking behind swift-built dams?
Now bend your thoughts toward the blankness to these lands’ west. Neither dark nor light, this emptiness is the perfect ground for the dreams that answer questions before they’re asked. Like the idea for Atlantropa that initially came to Horatiu, images emerging from our unconscious possess their own gravity. Dreams shape worlds. They shape worlds and they seed them, and therefore, dreams may be the best way to begin telling a world’s story.
So. What does the first dream of this world’s story feel like?
China’s anarcho-socialist May Fourth Movement undulated into being out of a breathless fear of drowning in others’ greed. There were similar crusades elsewhere: in Ireland, in France and Russia (among those who managed to escape the tyranny of both the Maltese Influenza and these two countries’ rampant imperialism), in Argentina, and in Bolivia. And colony after colony attempted to emulate Everfair’s independence, while descendants of enslaved and conquered people living under imperialist regimes took secret heart from their example. Only May Fourth, though, yearning above and below the waters separating them all, dared to imagine universal success. And only May Fourth’s Spirit Medicine promised to guarantee it.
Given the slowness of the spread of the Spirit Medicine’s organism via inoculated telegraph cables—speedy as vegetable love—May Fourth sought another way to transport the revolution’s empathy inducers to the Americas. But the United States shut its shores to keep away the ’flu. So did the dictatorships to its south. However, in dreams …
In velvet silence the archetypes assembled, strained out of memories filled with the struggle to overturn our oppressors. Evil in the guise of an assassin; good in the guise of royalty, a child, the rightful ruler of a wakened land; random chance in a monkey suit. Evil slew good, strangling it. And yet good did not die.
Over and over such dramas played through sleepers’ heads, in parts and wholes, submerged in the streams of other narratives, broken into bits and laced together to form new versions of the same events.
Here’s a fairly coherent example:
The blond beast stalks up the rippling staircase on two legs, long hands held out from its sides in readiness. Night’s darkness flows away from its path like music, pooling and spilling downward, filling the steps the beast leaves behind as it turns, mounts, turns again, and strides past guards steeped in drugs or strong drink or spells of blindness. Curtains fall open. The victim stands up from their couch and stretches imploringly toward the beast, which is suddenly our viewpoint. Then the victim shrinks back and edges toward the wallbehind it—behind him? Her? Gravity tilts and the victim continues backward, climbing to the ceiling to dangle overhead. Our arms raise our hands to grab and drag it to the floorwall and choke its slender throat and hold and hold and hold until there is no air to breathe for anyone. And we are about to suffocate, but then … then there is something else. Something more. A window in the wallfloor and it cracks and between its shattering edges peeps a face with eight eyes staring so hard they draw everything into their black shine.
Such dream sequences were common in North, Central, and South America. Sometimes the strangling hands were replaced with lynching ropes; sometimes the staring eyes became those of a crowd of slumping, work-worn women, or men hunched and staggering with weariness, or smiling children who reached eagerly to embrace and revive the beast’s dying prey.
Influencing the interpretation of these scenes as symbolic of the revolution took careful judgment. May Fourth partisans sent letters to painters, speakers, actors, singers, journalists, and the like, explaining how to understand the dreams in an artistic light. The theory they offered those tending toward a scientific outlook—the hemisphere’s scholars, inventors, and researchers—was that the living mass of the planet willed a change.
If so, it willed that change on several fronts, in several ways.
But was such a change the story’s beginning or its middle? Or maybe its conclusion? Could all these divisions overlap with each other, perhaps?
Or could it even be that Kinning begins before Everfair ends?
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