Kinning, p.1
Kinning, page 1
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For Chip, my fairy godfather
Anarchists of the May Fourth Movement refused to distinguish between means and ends, holding that the process of revolution lay in the creation of the future society in the present.
—“Anarchism in China,” Wikipedia
SOME NOTABLE CHARACTERS
Crew of Xu Mu
Ho Bee-Lung, pharmacist, botanist, Tink’s older sister
Ho Lin-Huang/Tink, inventor, engineer, Bee-Lung’s younger brother
Kwangmi, steering, Tink’s love
Ma Chau, steering, Kafia’s love
Kafia, Ma Chau’s love
Chen Jie-Jun, twin sister of Min-Jun
Chen Min-Jun, twin sister of Jie-Jun
Gopal Singh/Umar Sharif/Vinay, Dalit laborer, film star, intelligencer, Bee-Lung’s love
Brinda, cook, originally servant and intelligencer to Italian ambassadors
Raghu, navigator
Everfairers
Prince Ilunga/King Ilunga, son of Josina and Mwenda
Princess Mwadi/Queen Mwadi, daughter of Josina and Mwenda, aka “Bo-La”
Queen Josina, Mwenda’s favorite wife
King Mwenda, abdicating ruler of Everfair
General Thomas Jefferson Wilson, converted U.S. missionary, devotee of Loango
Serenissima Bailey/Rima Bailey, intelligencer and Mwadi’s love
Raffles, colobus monkey
Carmelita, cat
Lady Fwendi, educator
Hafiza/Luliwat, servant to Queen Mwadi
Lisette Toutournier, retired intelligencer, married to Daisy
Daisy Albin, retired poet, married to Lisette
Sifa, favored serving woman to Queen Josina
Lembe, favored serving woman to Queen Josina
Yoka, diviner and advisor
Bahir Haji, Hafiza’s father
Europeans
Alan Kleinwald, physicist, prisoner
Hubert Chawleigh, intelligencer and assassin, married to Clara
Clara Chawleigh, intelligencer, married to Hubert
Deveril Scranforth/Devil/Scranners, intelligencer, explorer
Herr Paul Schreiber, printer, intelligencer, married to Hanna
Frau Hanna Schreiber, printer, intelligencer, married to Paul
Signore Ercolano, intelligencer and Italian ambassador
Signore Gentileschi, intelligencer and Italian ambassador
Signore Gravina, intelligencer and Italian ambassador
Signore Quattrocchi, intelligencer and Italian ambassador
Sundry Allegiances
Sevaria binti Musa, Ceylon and Malaysia, film star, director, producer
Trana, Ceylon, servant to Sevaria
Jadida, Ceylon, servant to Sevaria
Rosalie Albin, Zanzibar and Everfair, merchant, daughter of Daisy, sister of Tink’s dead love Lily, Amrita’s love
Amrita, Zanzibar and India, merchant
Dr. U Shin, China, creator of Spirit Medicine (played in film by Umar Sharif)
Qadi Ahmed ibn Amir, Zanzibar, government official
AXIOMS
That in 1893 an alliance of British socialists and U.S. missionaries bought a vast tract of land in Africa’s Congo River region from its ostensible owner, Leopold II of Belgium.
That with the inclusion of the region’s displaced indigenes, the citizens of this new nation, Everfair, vanquished Leopold’s traitorous attempt to re-conquer them.
That the integration of Everfair’s disparate populations proved so difficult that the country reverted from a loose democracy to monarchy.
That combined with respect for traditional wisdom, Everfair’s technological proficiency in the use of steam, gasoline, and nuclear energy, and in automatic weaponry, lighter-than-air flight, and medicine, helped it to flourish into the twentieth century.
That despite choosing to fight on WWI’s defeated side, Everfair inspired a global anticolonialist movement that worked for change in tandem with rising revolutionary sentiments.
IMAGINARY CHAPTERS
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.
