Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

the last vendor stall at the edge of the market. Looking in, I saw a dozen small, translucent pieces of shimmering light, contained in glass. The holograms varied in size from a palm to a head. Each one was made up of a different set of shapes and colors, each in a different pattern of liquid motion. A small man with dark skin and silver hair sat cross-legged in the center of it all.

“We should hurry,” Naoto whispered.

“These are all emotions, aren’t they?” Danae asked the sitting man. “Specific mental and emotional states, synesthetically represented as abstract visuals. Right? I’ve heard about this kind of lightwork.”

The sitting man nodded.

She focused on a yellow-golden one, full of angular shapes that looked like shattered pieces of bronze glass. The holographic light oscillated in ten-second waves, flaring and slowly dying out into static. She raised her eyebrows and said “This one is . . . oh, well that’s too obvious. Orgasm. Male.”

The sitting man raised an eyebrow and nodded, evidently impressed.

Naoto sighed nervously.

“Give me a tougher one,” Danae said.

The vendor indicated another hologram. This one was made up of soft, warm colors, but as it turned, it revealed inward-facing needles of shimmering purple, dropping abruptly into sharp and turbulent black. It shuddered constantly.

She stared intently at it for a moment and said, “Melancholy, but . . . no, no. Pretending to be happy. While . . . secretly mourning the dead.”

The sitting man grinned. “Unthoughtful laughter in the presence of an unrequited love.”

“Oh, of course. Yes! I can see it now.”

“We don’t have much time before sunset,” Naoto whispered, tugging the shoulder of her coat. She swatted his hand away without shifting her gaze from the ragged gallery of dancing light.

“You understand my art intuitively,” the sitting man said, in strained English. “You truly get it! I’ve never seen that. Most people who see my art do not get it at all.”

“It’s wondrous!”

“I want you to see something.” He went along, tapping each of the holograms to extinguish them until the stall was dark. He took a stack of five scuffed panes and set them up in a line, and they sprung to life in sequence, filling the space with a single panoramic mass of blood-red light. From any distance it was completely amorphous, but every small segment of that drifting red vapor concealed crisp features: dripping rivulets of yellow fire, humanoid figures in motion (I couldn’t tell whether they were dancing or panicking), what almost looked like tiny stairwells of rough-hewn stone.

“Goodness,” Danae sighed in childlike awe. “What is this?”

“My great opus,” said the sitting man. “I have been working on this one for sixteen years. This one is not for sale. I cannot finish it. Can never get it right.”

“But what is it?”

“If I lived a thousand years, I’d still not have enough time to finish it.”

“But what is it?”

The artist sighed. “It’s not possible to speak it. To try would only do violence to the entire truth of it. Understand? If I could put it into words, I wouldn’t need to put it into light. Light is my only language for it.”

She broke her gaze with the mass of color. She looked at him, studying his eyes. She leaned over the table to speak giddily into his ear. “What if you didn’t need a language at all?”

He squinted. “What do you mean?”

She indicated the glowing morass and said, “This all has some meaning for you. Something you need to share, right? Words aren’t good enough, so you use holographic light art instead, but you can’t escape the same fundamental problems. Meaning is always lost on its way between you and your audience. First it gets corrupted when you try to translate what’s inside you into something outside of you, and then it’s corrupted again when the viewers try to translate it back into something inside of themselves.

“I’m saying, what if there were no translation? No medium, no middleman? You could have a thought, a feeling, and you could share it with someone else. No loss or misunderstanding. No noise.”

The sitting man scratched his chin and stared into space in deep thought. Finally he opened his mouth and said, simply, “No.”

“No? What do you mean ‘no?’”

He looked into his luminous clouds and said, “Hypothetically, there would be no need for any of this. No need for art of any kind. There would be no art at all.”

“But—”

“This is the work of my life,” he said solemnly. “It is everything I am.”

For a moment Danae stood chewing her knuckle in frustrated thought. Then she turned and walked on toward the truck depot—and I looked back to realize that she and Naoto had suddenly reversed roles: he was still back there, staring pensively at the field of holographic light. Finally he ran to catch up and leaned in to ask her, “Hold on. Is that true? Danae?”

“Is what true?” she sang, carefree again.

He looked over his shoulders and whispered almost too low for me to hear, “Is it true that unified people have no art?”

She didn’t seem to register his question. She just marched on into the dust, whistling random notes and chuckling at the sound on her own lips. She glanced at the members of a local gang and said, “One giant negative-sum game. That’s all that’s left of this land. Violence for sale in thirty different flavors. Taking what little is left from somebody else and clinging to it until somebody else comes to take it from you. But I remember how it was before. I remember.”

Naoto took a long look back before he followed us on into the dust.

DANAE

The world around me was spinning and glowing like an old carnival ride. I should have known better than to dose myself with an unlabeled injector full of what I now guessed had been an excessive amount of an impure reproduction of some military behavioral drug. Naoto should have known better than