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Charlie Jane Anders

THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

This manuscript has been translated from the original Xiosphanti and Argelan into Peak English, which as Jthkyklakno points out [ref. 2327. 288] has become “the language which everyone reads, but nobody speaks,” across several worlds and spacenodes. This exercise entailed a number of challenges, particularly with the “Mouth” sections, but given the amount of interest in these documents (and indeed, misinformation regarding their contents) a serious attempt at a clean translation appeared necessary. Despite all of the apparent fabulations and liberties taken in both of these narratives, they remain the closest thing we have to primary sources regarding the origins of this emergent new form of human sentience. Detractors such as Linghathy have argued for a mythocratic pseudoframe, choosing to view these hybrids as the products of a response to extreme environmental pressures, resulting in a kind of evolutionary assimilationism. These texts undoubtedly serve to complicate and possibly even subvert that framing. Note: Where the settlers on January chose to adopt archaic Earth terms for common items, along with local flora and fauna, I have attempted to render this into Peak English as seamlessly as possible. (Hence “radio,” “lorry,” “pager,” “crocodile,” “cat,” “bison,” etc. ) Names and proper nouns have also been regularized into English spelling, where possible (e. g. , “Sophie,” “Bianca,” “Reynold,” etc. ). For a glossary of Xiosphanti and Argelan terminology and common names, see Nuxhaven, ref. 11819. 99.

^PART

ONE

SOPHIE

{before}

Bianca walks toward me, under too much sky. The white-hot twilight makes a halo out of loose strands of her fine black hair. She looks down and fidgets, as though she’s trying to settle an argument with herself, but then she looks up and sees me and a smile starts in her eyes, then spreads to her mouth. This moment of recognition, the alchemy of being seen, feels so vivid that everything else is an afterimage. By the time she reaches the Boulevard, where I’m standing, Bianca is laughing at some joke that she’s about to share with me.

As the two of us walk back toward campus, a brace of dark quince leaves, hung on doorways in some recent celebration, wafts past our feet. Their nine dried stems scuttle like tiny legs.

I lie awake in our dark dorm room, listening to Bianca breathe on the shelf across from mine. And then I hear her voice.

“Sophie?”

I’m so startled, hearing her speak after curfew, I tip over and land in a bundle on the floor.

Bianca giggles from her bunk as I massage my sore tailbone. I keep expecting some authority figure, like one of the Proctors, to burst in and glare at us for disturbing the quiet time. If you can’t sleep when everyone else does, you’re not even human.