Geoff Ryman is a Canadian living in London. He has published eight novels and two volumes of his own short fiction. He has also co-edited a collection of Canadian science fiction and edited an anthology of collaborations between fiction authors and scientists. His stories and novels have won fourteen awards, most recently a 2012 Nebula for the novelette “What We Found.”
THERE WERE BIRDS INSIDE of her. Was she giving birth to them? One of them fluttered its wings against the walls of her uterus. He felt the wings flutter too. He felt what she felt in a paradise of reciprocity, but she was not real. This world had given birth to her, out of memory.
A dove shrugged its way out of her. Its round white face, its surprised black eyes made him smile. It blinked, coated with juices, and then, with a final series of convulsions, pulled itself free. The woman put it on her stomach to warm it, and it lay between them, cleaning itself. Very suddenly, it flew away.
He buried his face in her, loving the taste of her.
“Stay there,” she told him, holding his head, showing him where to put his tongue.
And he felt his own tongue, on a sensitive new gash that had seemed to open up along the middle of his scrotum.
She was delivered of fine milky substance that tasted of white chocolate. It sustained him through the days he spent with her.
She gave birth to a hummingbird. He knew then what was happening. DNA encodes both memory and genes. Here, in this other place and time, memory and genes were confused. She was giving birth to memories.
“Almost, almost,” she warned him, and held his head again. The hummingbird passed between them, working its way out of her and down his throat. Breathing very carefully, not daring to move in case he choked, he felt a wad of warm feathers clench and gather. He felt the current of his breath pass over its back, and he swallowed, to help it.
It made a nest in his stomach. Humming with its wings, it produced a sensation of continual excitement. He knew he would digest it. The walls of its cells would break down, giving up their burden of genes. He knew they would join with his own. Life here worked in different ways.
He became pregnant. All over his skin, huge pale blisters bubbled up, yearning to be lanced. He clawed at them until they burst, with a satisfying lunging outward of fluid and new life.
He gave birth to things that looked like raw liver. He squeezed them out from under the pale loose skin of the broken blisters, and onto the ground. They pulled themselves up into knots of muscle and stretched themselves out again. In this way, they drew themselves across the ground, dust sticking to each of them like a fine suede coat.
They could speak, with tiny voices. “Home,” they cried. “Home, home, home,” like birds. They wanted to go back to him. They were part of him, they remembered being him, they had no form. They needed his form to act. They clustered around him for warmth at night, mewling for reentry. In the end, he ate them, to restore them. He could not face doing anything else.
Their mother ate them too. “They will be reborn as hummingbirds,” she told him. She gave birth instead to bouquets of roses and things that looked like small toy trains.
He did not trust her. He knew she was collecting his memories from them. She collected people’s memories. She saw his doubt.
“I am like a book,” she said. “Books are spirits in the world that take an outward form of paper and words. They are the work of everyone, a collection. I am like that. I am communal. So are you.”
Her directness embarrassed him. His doubts were not eased. He walked through the rustling tundra of intelligent grasses. The hairs on the barley heads turned like antennae. The grass was communal too.
When he came back to the woman who was not real, she had grown larger. She lay entwined in the grass, and hugged him; she opened up and enveloped him. Warm flesh, salmon pink with blue veins, closed over him moist and sheltering, sizzling like steak and thumping like Beethoven. He lived inside her.
Prying ribbons explored him gently, opened him up. They nestled in his ears, or crept down his nose, insinuated their way past his anus, reached needle thin down the tip of his penis. They untied his belly button, to feed him. Flesh was a smaller sea in which, for a time, he surrendered his independent being.
