Shapers of Worlds Volume II

Going to Ground-1

Going to Ground

By Candas Jane Dorsey

After I had been in the cell for a while I started making spiders out of a small spitball of earth and my shed hair. Spiders are easy because of the symmetry. You can just cross four hairs and press them into the ball of mud. Once you get good at those, there are refinements. I managed to save eight eyelashes once, and built a tiny perfect eyelash arach who eventually bred with one of the real spiders to have hundreds of tiny eyelash babies. So beautiful, but they were too stupid, unlike their mother who could carry and spin messages, talk a little (I’d used a splinter to shape a tiny mouth), and wrote an entire monograph on the microscopic differences in types of plaster that, with her permission, I passed off as mine briefly when I needed something to show Amnesty International.

Of course, I had actually attributed it properly, but that was seen as delightful caprice from a truly gifted allegorical poet writing about confinement and social justice, instead of just another example of a talent suppressed by the prejudice of history (c.f. Clara Schumann or Berthe Morisot).

The eyelash spider and I shared a (rather rueful) laugh about that. When she disappeared, I tried for weeks to interest her offspring in science, or even in the art of detection, but they were hopelessly uninterested little libertarians, and finally I had to admit my friend had been a lucky accident of creation, a bit like the Mona Lisa. That serendipitous brush-stroke of a mouth.

I’d been earning a few bucks as a fish compiler before my arrest. Well, more than a few, and I may have cut a few corners. Sushi is all the rage again and I have a fondness for a particular grade of yellowtail, the kind with the very defined two colours and textures of flesh. That’s hard to do within existing regulations. But I had a lot of high-powered clients, and none of them wanted to lose their supply, so I figured as long as I skated only a little way out onto the frozen lake, and avoided the big fish (pun absolutely intended), I wouldn’t get onto ice too thin to support me. If you want to push the metaphor, I just stayed in the lee of the shore in my little winter shed and drilled a very small ice hole to fish through. Not my fault an iron monster swam by and came up to my bait, gathering ice, shed, my gear, and me in one huge gulp. Here I am in its belly, and that’s barely a metaphor, these days.

Maybe where you are, spiders don’t talk yet, dogs are still people’s best friends, and cats aren’t yet collaborators in disobedience. In the cell next to mine, at least one brown tabby and I know for sure two gelded orange toms, along with an assortment of dogs, are crowded into a delicate détente, broken a couple of times a day—but it’s more likely for a terrier to snarl at a Pom than for a full-on species war to break out, specist stereotypes notwithstanding, and no serious enmities arise.

They know that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend.

When you compile a fish you don’t want traced to you, you have a choice. With the best equipment, you can strip off all the copyright protection and present it as a natural fish. This only works if two preconditions are fulfilled: the fish has to be from a species still extant somewhere in the wild, and you have to have the best equipment. Oh, three, actually, because if you really want to sell it, it has to be legal to catch that fish, or farm it, somewhere in the world. Good luck with cod, for example. Trying to sell clean cod with un-marked genes is pretty much the classic definition of Too Stupid To Do Crime.

If you don’t have the best equipment, and can’t afford to have it ever, and can’t figure out who to bribe to get unauthorized use of it, your options are more limited. Go to plan B or C.

Second option: you spoof the tag of a bona fide dealer who has the rep you need.

Third: you scribble the tag so that it isn’t readable at all. Everyone knows the fish is fake but if you have scribbled thoroughly, scribbled a lot, and maybe scrubbed a little, you can’t be traced. The signature is useless. This is the cheapest option, but it’s labour-intensive. You have to do it microscopically and literally bit by bit. Guess which one I had to use. Go on, guess.

In general, someone in power just has to think that it’s a crime to make things, and someone else, someone who has to punch up, has to disagree. That gives you your baseline for insurrection.

Incognito, become a reluctant, hesitant revolutionary.

Civil disobedience is a grammar, a technique, a medium. When even painting a landscape is a disastrous act of defiance, art is resurrected as significant.

When I sit down to make something, whether it’s a spider or a manifesto—and what’s the difference between those, really?—I tend toward the obvious and the didactic, and get caught, but there are people in our movement who are true heroes of the revolution, so poetic and allusive that their acts are almost impenetrable to interpretation.

They are probably only not here in jail with me because no-one can figure out whether they made a book, a painting, or just a refrigerator or an algorithm.

The spiders I make are very different from my fish. Different process, and also they are not as tasty. A sour joke, unfair to my eyelash friend: I asked the tabby if it was true that spiders are sour, and they said, “Yes, true. Bitter and not really worth eating, but it’s my nature.”

Quizzically furthering the question, I was given to understand that a spider’s sideways scuttle in the night had often triggered a primal response to lateral motion, but the tabby of late had come to regret her heavy and automatic paw.

“It was someone new to talk to,” she said, which is how I discovered the fate of my eyelash buddy. “I’m sorry,” she continued when she saw my reaction. “It startled me when I was napping. I didn’t mean to.”

In other words, it’s my nature.

The defence of half the murderers in the world, but under the circumstances, I decided not to turn my grief into a grudge. Life in here didn’t allow such luxuries.

I did take a small revenge, though: I spent about a week telling them about my fish business, in detail. That cell was fed dry crunchies—cat or dog varieties—and water, and the tabby would unconsciously make little subvocal squeaks or gasps as I talked about tuna textures. After a while I got over that level of pettiness, partly because I came to like them, partly because the others were just as affected, and it wasn’t fair.

You know all about the bats by now, and their magical physiology, from which we stole anti-ageing and good health the way Prometheus, Dr. Dee, and Dr. Frankenstein stole fire from heaven, and with similar paradoxical results. Bottom line, at the end of the upheaval, anyone with bat DNA—as detected by eyeballing the genotype of anyone who wasn’t dead enough in one of the pandemics—was a criminal if they weren’t rich enough to have bought the cure: a classic case of Anything Not Compulsory Is Forbidden.

It wasn’t necessary to eliminate all the bats to bring about the chiroptocracy: that was just a side-hustle that the very rich used to safeguard their stuff—the Watts Prediction of 2021 came true a lot faster than was reasonable. But what he didn’t predict was how we would all get conned into participating in a scheme that makes that whole thing with the Chinese and the birds look like a conservation event.

Bounties on bats, patriotic purges, all the things. Anyone with a bat house in their back yard was a terrorist: let’s just say that besides my grandparents’ kind of civilly-disobedient gene-hedging, a lot of doughty old gardeners who had liked the old mail-order biz Lee Valley ended up spending some time in a black ops facility when they were too old to really enjoy it.

My parents were the second-gen, of course: they loved the nano, and wanted to combine and bond with whoever was left after the mass extinctions. Spiders, cockroaches, glass fish, hedgehogs, Arctic hares: they used themselves and their offspring as subjects, so I suppose I should be thankful I’m not Gregor Samsa or Harvey. (Very historical. Never mind.)

On the other hand, since any tweaks, even just nano, will twitch the profile nowadays, that put me in the illicit fish biz whether I liked it or not.

The spiders were just a bit of harmless fun on the side.

In fact, I came to like all of my neighbours.

I could hear them—oh, could I hear them—but I couldn’t see them unless one of them crowded into the very corner of their cell. Over time they took turns curling up there, and we would trade stories. Because there was only one of me, I made up a new biography every day, a source of some wonder and amusement to the literal-minded among them; in exchange I heard their lives.

The two orange lads, Dave and Henry, loved each other more than anyone else. That was it. They were agreeable old geezers really, and if they had been humans, they would have definitely ordered bat houses and dibbers online, back in the day. The tabby called herself—I discovered that she identified as “she” despite having been neutered—something I couldn’t pronounce, but admitted that her humans had sometimes called her Tig: despite their unoriginal attitude to naming, she loved them and had carried messages between their underground studios, had inevitably been caught—pastel dust on her paws and a tube of quinachrodone red in her mouth, capital offences, more or less, but it was a first offence, so she got fourteen years, a.k.a., at her age, life. She never saw her artists again.

The Yorkie, Washington, had been a companion dog to a guy in a wheelchair. He had bitten his friend’s arresting security officer and been kicked across the room (he still limped), and his human companion had still been dragged away, also never to be seen again: his failure to—impossibly—save the guy still haunted him. The Golden Retriever, Zaroo, had a similar story, but without wheelchairs and with some peculiar betrayal that seemed to only make sense to the sheepdogs.

Those sheepdogs. The Highland kind, they had been codebreakers and code-talkers, and they really were a pain in the ass. They refused to tell anyone their real names, for spy reasons, which was also annoying AF. The egos on those otherfrackers, srsly. But get them in the right mood, and they had some amazing stories.

The rest of the dogs—except the Pom; I’ll get to the Pom later—cycled through on short time. Denzel was a white standard poodle, ironically-named by the ancient hipsters who had been harvested when they passed their demographic sell-by date. He was repatriated out of here into a new fureverhome on the condition he inform on his new family: unclear if he did it willingly. Carrie was a Bassett in hunting trim and was taken off to be a government scent-hound. We think they did something to her brain, but we never found out what. Maybe she just wasn’t that bright, but conspiracy theories aren’t theories any more, these days, so you never know. Rami was an Akita, and spoke very little English, so we never really found out her story, but she had some awful scars on the side of her face and neck.

Aside from Tig, with whom I formed a surprisingly strong bond after all, Kvit the Pom was probably the one I liked best. A very anti-Russian Ukrainian who turned up after Mari but apparently for keeps, he had been an interpretive dancer until his rear knees gave out, but now mostly identified as an installation and performance artist, and he was always working on something new, even in jail: I have never known anyone to need a job so badly. I expect it is some kind of compulsion, the way a poodle I once knew would arrange the shoes in rows at the front door, or a vampire has to stop to count all the grains if you throw rice down in front of them.