Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente Read Free Book Online Page A

childhood, when her mother had come like a rescuing dragon to scoop her up out of the friendly but utterly chaotic house of her ever-sleeping father. The blazer only a shade or two off of true black, the skirt unforgiving, plunging past the knee, the blouse the color of a heart.
    When she showed me the frame I had understood, because three years is forever in machine-time, and I had known her that long. Ceno was using our language to speak to her mother. She was saying: Respect me. Be proud and, if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.
    Cassian smiled tightly. She still wore her yukata, for she had no one to impress.
    Show me.
    Ceno’s hand shook as she pressed a pearly button in the boardroom table. We thought a red curtain too dramatic, but the effect we had chosen turned out hardly less so. A gentle, silver light brightened slowly in an alcove hidden by a trick of angles and the sunset, coming on like daybreak.
    And I stepped out.
    We thought it would be funny. Ceno had made my body in the image of the robots from old films and frames Akan loved: steel, with bulbous joints and long, grasping metal fingers. My eyes large and lit from within, expressive but loud, a whirring of servos sounding every time they moved. My face was full of lights, a mouth that could blink off and on, pupils points of cool blue. My torso curved prettily, etched in swirling damask patterns, my powerful legs perched on tripod-toes. Ceno had laughed and laughed—this was a pantomime, a minstrel show, a joke of what I was slowly becoming, a cartoon from a childish and innocent age.
    “Mother, meet Elefsis. Elefsis, this is my mother. Her name is Cassian.”
    I extended one polished steel arm and said, as we had practiced. I used a neutral-to-female vocal composite of Ceno, Cassian, and the jeweler who had made Ceno’s pendant. “Hello, Cassian. I hope that I please you.”
    Cassian Uoya-Agostino did not become a bouncing fiery ball or a green tuba to answer me. She looked me over carefully as if the robot was my real body.
    “Is it a toy? An NPC, like your nanny or Saru’s princess? How do you know it’s different? How do you know it has anything to do with the house or your necklace?”
    “It just does,” said Ceno. She had expected her mother to be overjoyed, to understand immediately. “I mean, wasn’t that the point of giving us all copies of the house? To see if you could . . . wake it up? Teach it to . . . be? A real lares familiaris, a little god.”
    “In a simplified sense, yes, Ceno, but you were never meant to hold onto it like you have. It wasn’t designed to be permanently installed into your skull.” Cassian softened a little, the shape of her mouth relaxing, her pupils dilating slightly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re my daughter, not hardware.”
    Ceno grinned and started talking quickly. She couldn’t be a grown-up in a suit this long, it took too much energy when she was so excited. “But I am hardware! And it’s ok. I mean, everyone’s hardware. I just have more than one program running. And I run so fast. We both do. You can be mad, if you want, because I sort of stole your experiment, even though I didn’t mean to. But you should be mad the way you would if I got pregnant by one of the village boys—I’m too young, but you’d still love me and help me raise it because that’s how life goes, right? But really, if you think about it, that’s what happened. I got pregnant by the house and we made . . . I don’t even know what it is. I call it Elefsis because at first it was just the house program representing itself in my space. But now it’s bigger. It’s not alive, but it’s not not alive. It’s just . . . big. It’s so big.”
    Cassian glanced sharply at me. “What’s it doing?” she snapped.
    Ceno followed her gaze. “Oh . . . it doesn’t like us talking about it like it isn’t here. It likes to be