Writing from travel diary

I am to make a man for the Consulate. Having little time and no hard place to ground my pride, I make him shoddily. The fine detail will be up to my usual level, but his body is slapped-together mud around a strong but not enduring mesh. The mud’s dampness will have him rotting from the inside by the end of the year, but for this first month he will be perfectly fresh and stable and that is what my sponsors require. I set his body up under grow-lights, which shine through the wide-stretched drums of Luvian cloth and give the man history. The great dun zibeline above him drenches him in the subtle basics, years of walking and talking and eating. As it ages him he takes different time from the smaller, deeply-colored grow-lights. He is like a baby but not a baby, like a child but not a child. I mute and unmute the zibeline to draw him slowly through one phase and fast through another; I place and remove grow-lights so that his boyhood is strongly influenced by a calm nursery, but only enough of his adulthood to give him a formal way with children. Under neutral lights which keep him from sensory deprivation in the meanwhile, yet no longer change him, I sculpt his finer features. There he is: as though forty, a man of wide experience and learning who has talked politics at the cafes of Maroon and ridden rocs down the Fickle Stair. He never sees my face. I send him off to the party.


A week later I am informed that an important visiting queen has fallen in love with him and I should therefore perform any touch-ups necessary for a lifespan of thirty-odd years.


I am very good at what I do. This is impossible. I feign slow preparations for the procedure while starting work on a second man, as similar as I can make him.


Six months later I meet the first man face to face. We are in my receiving room, which is full of reminders of my craft and his nature. The queen’s attendants have been persuaded to retire with graphic descriptions of the work I am allegedly to be doing.


We look at each other. He is a fine piece of work and I gave him no inclination to foolishness. “To what degree will I survive this procedure?” he asks.


“You won’t.”


“Then pour me a little of the orange,” he says, gesturing to the low, black-glass drinks cabinet, “and tell me something about human memory. No one I have asked describes it well. Immersed too deep, I think.”


I could cheat him now: it would be prudent. Instead I turn my back on him with no further precautions. I am a slight woman and he remembers adventurous killing; and he loves life, and is good, by his own lights.


“Thank you,” I say when I have straightened up holding bottle and glasses.


He shrugs. “A great deal of nothing worth having. But I appreciate the offer. It was fair-minded.”


And we sit and drink and talk a little about human memory – what a spacious and perplexing thing it is compared to his, which all informs him in every moment – and he keeps his eyes open as I unravel him, watching a grey beetle flit in the corner.


The queen is pleased and leaves the city soon thereafter, and his replacement never sees my face. My work for the Consulate continues. I dream of places far away.